GPU Architecture for LLM Inference: Memory, Bandwidth and Hardware Explained

GPUs are the engines powering every AI conversation you've ever had — but what's actually happening inside those chips when an LLM generates a response? Understanding GPU fundamentals turns out to be surprisingly useful for making sense of why inference works the way it does, from the prefill stage that processes your entire prompt at once to the serial decode step that produces tokens one by one. If you want to understand the real constraints shaping modern AI systems, this is where to start.