Why does one f16 token take 64KB on Qwen3 8B? A KV cache explainer question
Fancy-Snow7 · reddit · 2026-10-24
A Reddit user asks: if one token is roughly half an English word — just a few bytes — why does a single f16 token take 64KB of memory on Qwen3 8B? The question points at how LLM inference actually works: the memory goes not to the token text but to the per-layer KV cache of attention vectors stored for each token.
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