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Inference & ServingHard· Latency· Model Sizing· Performance Optimization

Decode was 90% of latency in the last review, and someo...

At production batch sizes, the dollar share of decode is often significantly lower than its latency share. Swapping to a smaller model only reduces the weight-read portion of the decode phase. Since prefill latency depends on context length and rerank depth rather than model size, the total latency improvement is often negligible, while the smaller model may negatively impact output quality.

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