The scale of modern neural networks increasingly clashes with physical constraints. Architectures with billions of parameters demand immense computational power, memory bandwidth, and energy when deployed in data centers. However, when inference must run locally on edge devices, engineers face strict hardware constraints. Available memory is often limited to just a few gigabytes, while power budgets, battery capacity, silicon area, and thermal dissipation form a critical boundary where the demands of powerful algorithms collide with the limited resources of edge environments. At the same time, memory bandwidth itself becomes a bottleneck during inference, as generating each new token or prediction requires rapid access to large volumes of weights. This imbalance cannot be resolved by simplifying algorithms alone; it requires system-level optimization.…
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