对比GPU与新兴加速器在大模型推理中的表现,发现不同阶段各有优劣。
Prefill/Decode-Aware Evaluation of LLM Inference on Emerging AI Accelerators

- 按预填充和解码阶段分别评估性能,更精准反映实际表现
- GPU在预填充阶段始终领先,而GroqRack解码时延更低
- 加速器优势依赖于任务类型和批量大小,适合特定场景
随着大语言模型(LLMs)在对延迟和成本敏感的场景中部署增多,推理效率成为核心系统挑战。尽管当前主要依赖GPU,但越来越多的AI加速器声称在LLM推理上具有优势,然而其实际优于GPU的条件尚不明确。近期推理系统将执行过程分解为预填充(Prefill)和解码(Decode)两个阶段,二者具有不同的计算特性与延迟指标,通常以首令牌时间(TTFT)和每输出令牌时间(TPOT)衡量。本文使用统一模型Llama2-7B,对GPU与新兴AI加速器在两阶段上的推理性能进行相位感知评估。结果显示,GPU在计算密集的预填充阶段持续领先;而GroqRack在解码阶段表现出显著更低的TPOT(当前不支持批处理)。然而,随着批量大小增加,GPU在解码吞吐量上重新占据优势。这些发现表明各平台存在明显的阶段依赖性优势。我们进一步分析了不同加速器平台在预填充/解码异构拆分下的性能提升,识别出实现增益的工作负载与网络条件。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in latency- and cost-sensitive settings, inference efficiency has become a central systems challenge. While GPUs dominate current deployments, a growing number of AI accelerators claim advantages for LLM inference, yet it remains unclear under which conditions such accelerators outperform GPUs in practice. Recent inference systems decompose execution into Prefill and Decode phases, which exhibit distinct computational characteristics and latency metrics, commonly captured by time to first token (TTFT) and time per output token (TPOT). This paper presents a phase-aware evaluation of LLM inference performance across GPUs and emerging AI accelerators using a common model, Llama2-7B. By separately measuring Prefill and Decode performance, we reveal that accelerator advantages differ by phase and metric. Our results show that GPUs consistently excel in the compute-intensive Prefill phase, while GroqRack achieves significantly lower TPOT during Decode (batching not currently supported). However, GPUs regain an advantage in Decode throughput as batch size increases. These findings demonstrate that each platform exhibits distinct phase-dependent strengths. We further analyze heterogeneous Prefill/Decode disaggregation across different accelerator platforms, identifying performance gains and the workload and network conditions under which such gains are realized.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。