arXiv Machine Learning

The Token-Energy Law of LLM Decode: Active Bytes and Realized Time Account for Joules per Token

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Understanding the Energy Scaling of Large Language Model Inference Across Context Lengths and Attention Architectures

The paper systematically studies decode‑phase energy consumption of open‑source large language models using different attention architectures—Multi‑Head Attention (MHA), Grouped Query Attention (GQA), and GQA with Sliding Window Attention (SWA). It evaluates four models across varying context lengths, batch sizes, and generation workloads, measuring GPU energy via NVIDIA counters. Findings show that the attention mechanism is the main driver of how energy scales with context length, with MHA models growing steeply, GQA models growing less, and GQA+SWA remaining nearly constant; model size mainly sets absolute energy use, while batching can cut energy per token and latency by up to 87%.

By Molka Chkir, Syed Muhammad Danish, Jos H\"oll, Arghavan Asad
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

From Tokens to Watt-hours: Analytical Energy Estimation for LLM Inference on Modern GPUs

The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems. However, direct measurement of inference energy often requires hardware telemetry, power instrumentation, or infrastructure-specific monitoring, limiting its applicability in comparative studies, early-stage system design, and sustainability reporting.

arXiv AI
Sep 28

Energy Efficiency of Locally Deployed LLMs: A Preliminary Quantitative GPU Power Benchmark on Consumer Hardware

The paper reports a reproducible GPU power benchmark for 18 open‑source LLMs (0.5B–7B parameters) run on a single consumer RTX 4060ti GPU using the Ollama inference engine. Energy metrics such as mean/peak power, total energy per prompt, energy per output token, and throughput were measured, revealing that model architecture and quantization strategy, rather than parameter count alone, drive energy efficiency. The most efficient models were qwen2.5:0.5b and tinyllama:1.1b, while the 7B‑Mistral model consumed up to 8.6× more energy per token, and qwen3.5:0.8b(on) showed unusually high per‑prompt energy due to extended internal reasoning.

By Philipp M. Z\"ahl, Elja Dalipaj, Anika Hennig, Timon Bayer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

From Tokens to Watt-hours: Analytical Energy Estimation for LLM Inference on Modern GPUs

arXiv:2607. 26571v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The operational energy consumption of large language model (LLM) inference is becoming an increasingly important component of the environmental footprint of deployed AI systems.

By Tina Vartziotis, Rodopi Kosteli, Elli Vartziotis, George Dasoulas, Michael Keckeisen, Konstantinos Skianis, Sotirios Kotsopoulos, Francesca Dominici
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

DualPace: Decoupled Scheduling and Cooperative GPU--CPU Decoding for LLM Serving

DualPace is an LLM serving runtime that decouples scheduling between a GPU engine and an AMX‑enabled CPU engine, allowing the CPU to independently batch and advance decodes while still cooperating with the GPU for dense stages. This design expands key‑value cache capacity into host memory and reduces bursty CPU progress, leading to significant throughput gains—up to 43.2 % over NEO and 90.6 % over vLLM—without increasing latency. The system also maintains low time‑to‑first‑token and supports higher request rates at comparable tail latency.

By YuXuan Lin, KeQiang Wu, Kingsum Chow
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8

Energy-Efficient GPU DVFS for Fine-Tuning of SLMs on Resource-constrained Embedded Devices

arXiv:2607. 05933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS) on resource-constrained embedded GPU platforms is essential for energy-efficient small language model (SLM) fine-tuning, as privacy- and personalization-driven adaptation increasingly requires local execution and involves repeated forward-backward optimization over many mini-batches, making it substantially more time- and energy-intensive than single-pass inference.

By Jurn-Gyu Park, Sanzhar Zholdybayev, Aidar Amangeldi, Ademi Zhanuzakova
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Evaluating the Applicability of LLM Inference Optimizations on Apple Silicon

The paper investigates how well common large‑language‑model (LLM) inference optimizations perform on Apple Silicon compared to server‑class NVIDIA GPUs. Four optimization families—KV‑cache pruning, speculative decoding, ported GPU kernels, and post‑training quantization—are evaluated on four Apple machines under a single‑request decode workload, with matched RTX 4090 comparisons where possible. Results show that KV‑cache pruning can boost Apple throughput up to 1.75×, while speculative decoding actually reduces throughput on Apple; CUDA kernel designs transfer only partially, and quantization gains vary by machine, indicating that speedups depend on the specific technique, runtime, hardware, and workload regime.

By Kyrylo Yemets, Andrii Yaroshevych, Victor Muryn, Ostap Khomenko, Pavlo Kryven, Maksym Kmet, Maksym Shamrai, Mariya Hirna