SemiAnalysis: Is TTFT Overrated? Large Model Inference Bottleneck Is the Trade-off Between Interactivity and Throughput

CoinFeed July 11 news, SemiAnalysis published an article pointing out that the commonly cited 'time-to-first-token' (TTFT) in large model inference may be overemphasized by the market. The core dimension of inference systems is not 'the faster the better,' but a trade-off between 'per-user interaction speed (tok/s/user)' and 'overall throughput efficiency (tok/s/GPU).' In most scenarios, TTFT has limited impact on experience, but the token speed during the generation phase is the key variable. SemiAnalysis concludes that only about 10%–20% of inference tasks are truly latency-bound, while the remaining scenarios rely more on throughput and cost efficiency optimization.