Measuring the Inference Energy Efficiency of Open-Weight LLMs across Benchmarks, Reasoning Modes, and Hardware

arXiv cs.AIOctober 14, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2610.14389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmark scores tell us what an LLM can do, but not how much energy is required to deliver that capability. We directly measure this trade-off for 86 open-weight model checkpoints, evaluated on seven benchmarks and six hardware platforms ranging from a consumer GPU to an eight-GPU server. We find large differences in energy efficiency even among models with similar capability. Most configurations lie away from the score--energy Pareto frontier: they use a median of 2.6--4.8$\times$ more energy than another configuration that scores at least as well, with differences reaching 27$\times$. Reasoning can improve capability, but enabling thinking i

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