Powers of Ten

One forward pass, at four magnifications. Each level's totals are built from the level below rather than restated at it, so the levels cannot disagree — and the two places where the sums stop being exact are the two places memory traffic and wasted arithmetic come from.

Model

What this level is made of

Does it add up?

Start at Model and zoom in. Click any operation in the layer breakdown to descend into it, or use the breadcrumb to jump.

  • Switch Phase from prefill to decode and watch the arithmetic intensity collapse. Nothing about the model changed — only how many query rows share the weights that had to be fetched.
  • Raise the batch size in decode. Intensity climbs roughly linearly, because the same fetched weights now serve more rows.
  • Drop the weights to INT4. Bytes fall, intensity rises, and an operation can flip from memory-bound to compute-bound without its FLOPs changing at all.
  • At Tile level, compare the bytes moved with the bytes an ideal machine would move. That ratio is the reuse factor.