Equation 23 · What an AI Accelerator Actually Is: Silicon, Packaging, and the Memory It Can Reach
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Bandwidth-limited throughput is the regime where achieved FLOPS is irrelevant because I is the binding term. Autoregressive decoding in a served language model is the clearest case: generating a single token requires streaming the model weights and the accumulated key-value cache out of memory, and performs only a small number of operations per byte read. The time per decoding step obeys
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