arXiv AI

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.

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 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
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
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606. 23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck.

By Bohua Zou, Nian Liu, Binqi Sun, Matteo Mascherin, Debayan Roy, Yutao Liu, Yu Peng, Ning Jia, Haibo Chen
arXiv AI
Jun 16

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

arXiv:2605. 27599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026.

By Deepak Panigrahy, Aakash Tyagi
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

How Do Prompt Variations Affect Energy Consumption in On-Device LLMs?

The paper investigates how prompt design influences energy consumption in on-device large language models (LLMs). It examines two prompt properties—cognitive load and phrasing pattern—across various datasets, models, and devices, using phase-level profiling to separate prefill and decode energy. Findings show that cognitive load mainly affects energy per token, while phrasing pattern influences energy mainly through token usage, and that prompt design reshapes the energy-quality trade‑off differently for each model.

By Wei Hu, Xiaolong Tu, Dawei Chen, Yitao Chen, Kyungtae Han, Haoxin Wang