fp4 ISSUE 001 · 2606
A publication for engineers shipping inference

The engineering
layer of AI.

Deep technical writing on LLM, GPU, and ML systems internals — decoded from silicon to system to algorithm, for the engineers who already know what RAG is.

fp4 quantizer E2M1 · 4-bit float
input · fp32 3.7194
quantized · fp4 4.0
quantization error 0.281
−6−2026

/01

Three layers, one publication

Pick your depth
/02

Latest

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Context Window Management for Multi-Agentic Platforms

Eight strategies ordered by leverage-per-complexity — from prompt caching to bandit-scored tool selection — with the economics, code, and latency budget for each.

⚙⚙⚙⚙⚙ 2026.07.01

The KV Cache: A Definitive Engineering Analysis

Naive autoregressive inference recomputes the entire attention matrix at every decoding step. KV caching stores the immutable K and V projections instead, converting per-step O(t·d) cost to O(d) exactly — no approximation.

⚙⚙⚙⚙○ 2026.06.27

Flash Attention: A Complete Architectural Autopsy

From O(N²) HBM catastrophe to Hopper-native warp-specialized pipelines: every trick, every number, every tradeoff decoded. Standard attention is not bottlenecked by arithmetic — it is bottlenecked by memory bandwidth.

⚙⚙⚙⚙⚙ 2026.06.27

PagedAttention: How vLLM Borrowed Virtual Memory to Unlock GPU Serving at Scale

Static KV cache pre-allocation wastes 60–80% of GPU memory under production traffic patterns. PagedAttention applies OS-style virtual memory paging to the KV cache, enabling 3× higher concurrency on the same hardware.

⚙⚙⚙⚙○ 2026.06.27

Continuous Batching: The Scheduling Insight That Made LLM Serving Actually Work

Static batching blocks an entire batch until its longest sequence finishes. Moving the scheduling boundary from request to iteration frees GPU slots at every decode step, taking utilization from 20–35% to 70–85%.

⚙⚙⚙○○ 2026.06.27

The Missing Decision Guide: Parallelism Strategies in LLM Training and Inference

NVLink delivers 9–18× more bandwidth than InfiniBand NDR. Every parallelism decision is a negotiation with that ratio — this is the decision tree from hardware topology and model architecture to a concrete TP/PP/SP/DP configuration.

⚙⚙⚙⚙⚙ 2026.06.27
All 23 articles →
/03 — Editorial thesis

We decode AI one layer at a time.

01 Silicon
What the hardware can do
hbm · nvlink · tensor cores
02 System
How inference actually runs
kv cache · batching · parallelism
03 Algorithm
Why the math works
attention · moe · quantization
fp4 editorial desk — restraint at the hardware level, restraint in the prose
WHAT WE ARE
Dense
Every article cites the paper, derives the math, and shows the code. No padding.
WHAT WE PROVE
Verifiable
Numbers you can reproduce on your own hardware — never vendor benchmarks.
WHAT WE REFUSE
No filler
Written for engineers building inference infra, not engineers explaining what inference is.