The Two-Phase Machine: Your LLM Request Is Two Jobs in a Trench Coat

Every API call you make to an LLM is secretly two jobs glued together. The first reads your entire prompt in one giant matrix multiply — compute-bound, GPUs at full throttle. The second dribbles out tokens one at a time, each step re-reading the entire conversation history from memory — memory-bandwidth-bound, the GPU mostly idling. Run them on the same GPU and each one sabotages the other. The industry's 2026 answer, reached independently by half a dozen labs: stop running them on the same GPU.
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