Engineering· For Head of AI / ML platform

Heterogeneous inference, explained: why no single chip is best at agents

Single-silicon inference clouds optimize for single-call benchmarks.

Marcus Liang · Head of Inference Engineering April 15, 2026 8 min

If you take one thing from this post: the published latency benchmark for your favorite model on your favorite GPU is, at best, half the story for an agent.

Why one chip can't win

The four silicon classes that matter

  • CPUs.
  • GPUs (H100/H200/B200/MI300).
  • TPUs.

Why most clouds can't do this

"We measured a 4.7× cost reduction and a 3.2× p95 improvement just from moving orchestration off GPUs."

Engineering blog, Synaptix Labs

What this means for your benchmarking

If you're evaluating inference vendors for an agent program, single-call benchmarks (TTFT, tokens-per-second on one model) will mislead you.

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