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.

Synaptix Editorial · Product and 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

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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