The focus of inference has shifted from chip capabilities to system orchestration, as evidenced by NVIDIA Rubin's specifications. With a scale-out bandwidth of 1.6 TB/s per GPU and 72 GPUs operating as a single NVLink domain, the bottleneck is now in efficiently feeding data to the chips rather than the chips themselves. The hardware improvements in bandwidth and compute power outpace the increase in HBM capacity, indicating that static loading of larger models is no longer sufficient. The future lies in dynamically managing and streaming data across multiple GPUs, transforming inference into a system-level challenge rather than a chip-level one. This matters because optimizing inference now requires advanced system orchestration, not just more powerful chips.
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