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LLM FoundationsMedium· Model Architecture· Scaling Laws· Inference Performance

You have two candidate architectures at the same parame...

According to Kaplan et al., model shape has a minimal impact on loss at a fixed parameter count. Therefore, the decision should be driven by operational requirements. The deeper model (48 layers) is 42% more expensive in terms of KV cache and introduces more serialization during decoding. However, if the deployment environment utilizes pipeline parallelism, the deeper model may be preferred as it partitions more cleanly across hardware.

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