[LLM 10/10] Deployment: You're Not Waiting on Compute, You're Waiting on Weights to Travel
· 26 min read
Across nine chapters we've injected knowledge, taught format, arranged preferences, distilled models, kept models from breaking, and measured honestly. But even our best model is still just a checkpoint file that nobody can call. This final chapter puts it into real service, and proves the single sentence that governs every decision in LLM serving: decoding one token at a time is not limited by compute power, it is limited by memory bandwidth — we'll compute the speed ceiling from the GPU's datasheet before writing a single line of code, then measure the real thing against it.