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.
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 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
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.
arXiv:2608.28667v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised concerns about their environmental impact during inference. While Green AI researc...
By Rajeswari Kannan, Raj Firke, Shreya Bengle, Srushti Deshmukh
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:2606. 13747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate power estimation is important for understanding and optimizing CPU power behavior, yet practical workflows often rely on simulation-derived information or post-silicon analysis.
By Honghua Zhu, Chunjie Luo, Jianfeng Zhan
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:2608. 06723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly increased computational cost, energy consumption, and inference latency, making accurate estimation essential for sustainable artificial intelligence deployment and hardware-aware design.
By Saeid Shokoufa, Mohammad Erfan Sadeghi, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
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: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:2609.33965v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: We describe a methodology for estimating the per-token energy cost of cloud-hosted large language model (LLM) inference, separating between i...
By Joshua Horswill, Ross Hunter, Matt Clifford, James Hall