Misha Smulyanski of Marlowe presents at YC Paper Club, arguing that shifting resource bottlenecks across inference phases require specialized, heterogeneous hardware infrastructure.
“Inference Is a very heterogeneous workload, right? Different phases of inference exercise, compute, network, storage, memory bandwidths differently, and so when we look at it makes sense to actually co-design the systems that will opt to, you know, use different hardware, different systems for different phases.”
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More from Misha Smulyanski
Insight
Smulyanski: On-die SRAM accelerators excel at LLM decode due to high bandwidth
“The SRA machine basically keeps the entire weight matrix in SRA memory on DAI, so the, you got a lot more bandwidth, right, because it's on chip, right, so you can access, you know bytes over cycles, right, the chip interconnect is also fast, you can go, like …”
Misha SmulyanskiJul 29, 2026▶ 55:29Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
AssertionSupported
Smulyanski: LLM decode workloads remain bandwidth-bound even across large batch sizes
“Pre-fill is generally very compute bound. Right because you basically do, ah, like, attention, ah, you do, ah, ah, a lot of, ah work for, you know, for, you know, all the tokens that you are fetching, right? You can, ah, you fetch the weights while I'm once an…”
Misha SmulyanskiJul 29, 2026▶ 51:45Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
Insight
Smulyanski: GPU throughput drops sharply at low concurrency due to kernel overheads
“The moment that you start basically going to lower concurrency because you want better interactivity and better latency, Right? The performance the throughput drops. And it drops very sharply because all of a sudden you have a lot of, like, smaller kernels, yo…”
Misha SmulyanskiJul 29, 2026▶ 59:40Multi-GPU Kernels, Intelligence per Watt, Heterogeneous Inference, and More | YC Paper Club · Y Combinator
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