← All parts of this equation

Equation 24 · Part 7 · What an AI Accelerator Actually Is: Silicon, Packaging, and the Memory It Can Reach

addition

tstep≥Bweights+Bkvβ,t_{\mathrm{step}} \ge \frac{B_{\mathrm{weights}} + B_{\mathrm{kv}}}{\beta},
addition

What this part means

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

Its job in the formula

Add the term after the plus sign to the term or group before it.

The passage around this formula

Bandwidth-limited throughput is the regime where achieved FLOPS is irrelevant because β\beta ⋅\cdot 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 tstep≥Bweights+Bkvβt_{\mathrm{step}} \ge \frac{B_{\mathrm{weights}} + B_{\mathrm{kv}}}{\beta}. a floor set entirely by memory traffic, in which peak arithmetic does not appear. This is why batching improves throughput so dramatically — the same weight bytes are amortised across many sequences, raising I — and why it does not improve single-stream latency at all.

Read this part in the article →

Learn the underlying idea

Addition combines quantities; subtraction measures the signed difference between them. Parentheses show what is combined before the rest of the expression is evaluated.

Open the illustrated addition and subtraction in an equation guide →

Sources cited in the article section

These citations provide research context; check each source for the exact claim it supports.