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
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: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:2609.09662v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) directly on mobile platforms at the edge is gaining traction due to a myriad of benefits, such as increased pr...
By Weisi Yang, Stephen Xia
Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption. Optimizing these deployments requires matching specific LLMs to the most efficient GPUs, but operators currently lack the tools to do so without exhaustively profiling each combination.
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:2607. 02391v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) inference workloads are a rapidly growing contributor to data center energy consumption.
By Mauricio Fadel Argerich, Jonathan F\"urst, Marta Pati\~no-Mart\'inez
arXiv:2608. 10506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate pre-deployment estimation of CNN inference cost--energy, latency, and peak memory--is increasingly critical as models are deployed on resource-constrained GPU platforms.
By Linh Nguyen, Zhixin Pan
Accurate pre-deployment estimation of CNN inference cost--energy, latency, and peak memory--is increasingly critical as models are deployed on resource-constrained GPU platforms. Existing approaches rely on FLOPs, latency measurements, or single-device profiling as energy proxies, overlooking the non-linear interactions between architectural design and hardware load.
arXiv:2608.28044v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language model (LLM) inference serving is priced by tokens, but GPU energy is consumed over inference windows. This accounting mismatch makes t...
By Prabhu Vellaisamy, Vanessa Lam, Shawn Blanton, John Paul Shen
arXiv:2509. 04827v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The energy cost of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is rapidly becoming a barrier to sustainable and scalable deployment.
By Jiahuan Yu, Aryan Taneja, Junfeng Lin, Minjia Zhang
arXiv:2603. 16428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) has become essential for domain adaptation, but its memory-intensive property exceeds the capabilities of most GPUs.
By Ruijia Yang, Zeyi Wen