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:2608.28044v1 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: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
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 investigates the energy costs of multilingual large language model (LLM) inference, revealing significant disparities across languages. Using the ML.Energy framework, the authors find that energy consumption per output token can differ by up to 8.3×, and total energy for a fixed request set can vary up to 179×, with English being the cheapest and Pashto the most expensive. The study attributes these differences to higher per-token costs for complex or rare scripts and longer outputs for low‑resource languages, and notes that high‑energy languages also tend to have lower task accuracy.
By Naihao Deng, Alissa Shen, Yiming Feng, Joan Nwatu, Jae-Won Chung, Mosharaf Chowdhury, Yulong Chen, Rada Mihalcea