AI article
What Actually Happens During Speculative Decoding in LLMs
Community description: How draft models, parallel target verification, and rejection sampling break the GPU memory bandwidth bottleneck without losing output quality.
Dev.to | Oct 4, 2026 | Syed Anzar
Automated excerpt
Evaluating 1 Token: 41. 8 ms (memory) + 0. 07 ms (compute) = 41. 87 ms Evaluating 5 Tokens: 41. 8 ms (memory) + 0. 35 ms (compute) = 42. 15 ms Verifying 5 tokens in parallel takes virtually the exact same wall-clock time as generating 1 token. Generating 5 draft tokens takes roughly $5 \times 0. 6\text{ ms} = 3. 0\text{ ms}$. Head 1 predicts token $t+1$, Head 2 predicts token $t+2$, Head 3 predicts token $t+3$.
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