Understanding the Performance and Power of LLM Inferencing on Edge Accelerators

Abstract: LLMs have demonstrated exceptional benefits to a wide range of domains, for tasks as diverse as code generation and robot navigation. While LLMs are usually served from cloud data centers, mission-critical and privacy-sensitive applications may require local hosting of open LLM models. Given the large GPU memory footprint needed for LLMs, edge accelerators such as Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX with 64GB of shared GPU-CPU RAM are a compelling choice. However, the feasibility and performance of LLM inference on edge accelerators is under-explored. This study presents a detailed evaluation of LLM inference on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin AGX, on four SOTA models ranging from 2.7B to 32.8B parameters, such as Meta Llama3.1, Microsoft-Phi2, Deepseek-R1-Qwen. We investigate the impact of varying batch sizes, sequence lengths, and quantization levels on latency, throughput, and perplexity, and also explore various custom power modes on the Orin AGX to perform power and energy consumption analysis. Our findings offer interesting insights on the trade-offs between efficiency, inference speed and resource use, e.g., increasing the sequence length causes a decrease in token throughput and quantization causes smaller LLMs to be slower. These results can help optimize LLM serving on edge accelerators for practical applications.