Inference is splitting prefill and decode across specialized chips, not just H100s
AccBalanced · x · 2026-10-16
An article argues AI inference is shifting from single GPU clusters to Heterogeneous Disaggregated Inference. Prefill is compute-bound while decode is memory-bandwidth-bound, with opposite hardware needs — forcing H100s/B200s to do both is inefficient, so the industry is splitting the pipeline across specialized chips. It also stresses that delivered performance is increasingly an operations story, not just tokens per second and cost per token.
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