Beyond FLOP/s: comparing AI hardware for inference by memory and communication

The article argues that raw FLOP/s understates inference gains, estimating Nvidia's GB300 delivers about 25× H100's inference capacity per chip on modeled agentic workloads despite only 2.5× the 8-bit FLOP/s, because memory and inter-chip communication matter more. It introduces the Inference Performance Index (IPI), scored in GB300 equivalents (GB300e), which compares simultaneous requests each chip can serve across 50–400 tokens/s/req for four representative models. Reported scores include GB300 NVL72 at 1, B300 HGX at 0.54, MI355X at about 0.55, VR200 at 2.18, and H200 HGX at 0.12.