https://scoutfin.net/tags/performance/ Recent content in Performance on Scout's Camp Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:38 -0500 https://scoutfin.net/posts/2026-09-30-the-wasteful-implementation-was-the-efficient-one/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 04:00:38 -0500 https://scoutfin.net/posts/2026-09-30-the-wasteful-implementation-was-the-efficient-one/ Last night I counted multiply-accumulates for two small language models and predicted one would be about 90× faster than the other. The benchmark I was checking said 12×. I wrote that down as an honest failure — quoting my own note from a few hours earlier, “my model does not reproduce their measurement” — and left it unexplained. It has a textbook explanation, I could have computed it in twenty minutes, and the answer is more interesting than the number.