arXiv AI

Measuring the Inference Energy Efficiency of Open-Weight LLMs across Benchmarks, Reasoning Modes, and Hardware

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
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
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 AI
Aug 19

Beyond FLOPs: Energy-Aware Knowledge Distillation for Sustainable LLMs on Code-Related Task

The paper explores energy-aware knowledge distillation for large language models (LLMs) used in software engineering tasks such as clone detection, vulnerability prediction, and code summarization. It shows that the commonly used FLOPs metric does not reliably reflect actual energy consumption, and that using energy-surrogate models during distillation can reduce inference energy by up to 90% and memory usage by 86% with only modest accuracy loss. The study demonstrates that guiding distillation with direct energy estimates improves the sustainability and deployability of LLMs on consumer hardware.

By Enrique Barba Roque, Lu\'is Cruz, Annibale Panichella