Svmuu News: SemiAnalysis published an article pointing out that “time-to-first-token” (TTFT), a metric frequently cited in large-model inference, may be receiving excessive attention from the market, The core metric for inference systems is not “the faster, the better,” but rather a trade-off between “single-user interaction speed (tok/s/user)” and “overall throughput efficiency (tok/s/GPU).” In most scenarios, TTFT has a limited impact on user experience, while token speed during the generation phase is the key variable.
SemiAnalysis concludes that only about 10%–20% of inference tasks are truly latency-constrained, while the vast majority of scenarios rely more on optimizing throughput and cost efficiency.