Compute Economics
Capex versus tokens, utilisation and depreciation, price-performance curves and the cost floor of inference.
5concepts
56flashcards
35minutes of reading
- 01 Capex, Depreciation and the Cost of a GPU-Hour How a purchased accelerator's cost becomes an hourly rate, why the depreciation schedule is the contested assumption, and what utilisation does to the answer.
- 02 The Cost Floor of Inference What sets the minimum achievable cost per token, why memory bandwidth rather than compute is the binding constraint, and which techniques move the floor rather than approaching it.
- 03 The Price-Performance Curve Why cost per unit of AI capability has fallen far faster than hardware improvement alone, the three compounding contributions, and what that implies for planning.