Contents

Inference Engineering Distilled

A field guide to efficient, reliable model serving.

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11 units

  1. P

    Preface

    Why inference engineering has become a discipline of its own.

    9–144 min read

    • scope
    • inference-stack
  2. 0

    Inference

    Define the inference stack and decide when specialization pays off.

    15–2211 min read

    • scope
    • inference-stack
    • specialization
  3. 1

    Prerequisites

    Connect product constraints, model choice, evaluation, and serving metrics.

    23–3811 min read

    • model-selection
    • latency
    • throughput
    • evaluation
  4. 2

    Models

    Read model architecture through the bottlenecks it creates at inference time.

    39–7012 min read

    • transformers
    • attention
    • mixture-of-experts
    • roofline
  5. 3

    Hardware

    Map compute, memory, and interconnect limits onto serving behavior.

    71–9211 min read

    • gpu
    • memory
    • interconnects
    • accelerators
  6. 4

    Software

    Choose runtimes and kernels with evidence from benchmarks and profiles.

    93–11611 min read

    • kernels
    • runtimes
    • benchmarking
    • profiling
  7. 5

    Techniques

    Select optimization levers by bottleneck, quality budget, and topology.

    117–15212 min read

    • quantization
    • speculation
    • caching
    • parallelism
    • disaggregation
  8. 6

    Modalities

    Compare the inference pipelines and bottlenecks of text, vision, audio, and video.

    153–17612 min read

    • vision
    • audio
    • embeddings
    • generation
  9. 7

    Production

    Operate inference as a reliable, observable, and cost-aware service.

    177–20812 min read

    • scaling
    • reliability
    • observability
    • cost
    • protocols
  10. A

    Glossary

    A quick reference for the vocabulary of inference systems.

    209–2306 min read

    • reference
    • terminology
  11. B

    Recommended Reading

    A categorized route into the sources behind modern inference engineering.

    231–2566 min read

    • reading-map
    • references