Is Speculative Decoding Worth It? Profiling vLLM on NVIDIA Blackwell — Akamai

Why watch

Technical deep-dive on speculative decoding with vLLM on NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, explaining how a small draft model proposes tokens verified by the target model in single forward pass. Covers prefill/decode phase optimization, memory costs of hosting dual models, draft model selection criteria, and demos showing 1.6x speedup for structured output with high acceptance rates but much lower gains for creative writing. For ML engineers and LLM inference practitioners looking to optimize serving performance.