Date: 27.08.2025

PyTorch pp512 and tg128 LLM Benchmark

What is this project about?

• pp512-tg128-bench is a lightweight, reproducible benchmark suite for PyTorch in different GOU.
• The code is modular model loading, GPU detection, data prep, tests, timing, and terminal rendering are separated for easy maintenance.

How the tests work (two test cases)

• pp512 — Prompt Processing (prefill)
  • Measures the speed of a single forward pass over a random prompt of 512 tokens for a batch B.
  • Reports tokens/sec computed as (B × 512) / median_time.
  • Reflects compute-bound throughput (big GEMMs / SDPA). Sensitive to attention kernels (SDPA/FA2), dtype (FP16/BF16), and tensor-core/matrix-core performance.
  • Supports optional microbatching (--ubatch) to emulate llama.cpp’s n_ubatch behavior (grows KV cache chunk-by-chunk).
• tg128 — Text Generation (decode)
  • Measures the speed of generating 128 new tokens, one token at a time, using KV cache initialized by a short prefill.
  • Reports tokens/sec computed as (B × 128) / median_time of the decode loop only (prefill isn’t counted).
  • Reflects latency & memory-bound behavior: frequent small matmuls, KV reads/writes, and cache layout efficiency. Often stresses memory bandwidth/latency more than raw FLOPs.

Implementation notes:

• Inputs for pp* are random token ids with special tokens filtered out; the first token is set to BOS for consistency.
• Tests run multiple iterations with warmup; the table shows t/s and the ± std over iterations.

Applicability (what you can benchmark)

• Compare PyTorch inference performance across different GPUs and stacks: NVIDIA, AMD
• Evaluate how attention implementation affects speed: sdpa, eager, or flash_attention_2 (if available).
• Quantify impact of precision/quantization (FP16/BF16 vs. 4-bit via bitsandbytes, where supported).
• Track improvements/regressions across driver/toolkit versions (CUDA/ROCm), PyTorch/Transformers versions.

Required Mistral 7b

Test environment

• AMD Mi50 32Gb VRAM
• Workstation 40 GB RAM, 200GB SSD, 750W Power supply
• Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
• Docker CE

Preparation

Create virtualenv

• For AMD ROCm 6

mkdir -p ~/llm && cd ~/llm
python3 -m venv .venv_llm_bench
source ./.venv_llm_bench/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/rocm6.0
pip install "transformers>=4.41" accelerate einops rich

• For NVIDIA CUDA 12

mkdir -p ~/llm && cd ~/llm
python3 -m venv .venv_llm_bench
source ./.venv_llm_bench/bin/activate
python -m pip install --upgrade pip
pip install "torch==2.5.0" "torchvision==0.20.0" "torchaudio==2.5.0" --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu124
pip install "bitsandbytes==0.44.1"
pip install "transformers>=4.41" accelerate einops rich

• Check pytorch

python3 -c "import torch; print(torch.__version__); print(torch.cuda.is_available());print(torch.cuda.get_device_name(0));"

Get the Mistral

git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1 mistral

Get benchmark source code

git clone https://github.com/llmlaba/pp512-tg128-bench.git

Run test

• Without quantization

python ./app.py -m ../mistral --tests pp512 tg128 --dtype fp16 --batch 1 --attn sdpa --warmup 3 --iters 10 --ubatch 128

• With quantization

python ./app.py -m ../mistral --tests pp512 tg128 --dtype fp16 --batch 1 --attn sdpa --warmup 3 --iters 10 --ubatch 128 --quant 4bit

Enjoy the result

All project avalible on github