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flopcross
confirmedGo · CPUInference & servingJuly 7, 2026
the question
Where does transformer compute go, and when does attention overtake the FFN?
what came out
The FFN owns ~88% of fixed per-token FLOPs, but attention grows linearly with context and overtakes it at exactly 1.5 x ffn_dim tokens (13,440 for the 1.5B, 7,296 for the 0.5B) -- a clean architectural constant, because d_model cancels. Go, exact, pre-registered.
method & receipts
- Result: confirmed
- Pre-registered — the prediction was written down and committed before the run.
- Reproducible — one script re-runs the whole thing from scratch.
- Independently reviewed — an adversarial review pass, kept in the repo.
- Machine-readable claims — every reported number, in a checkable file.
→ read the code and re-run it
github.com/v-code01/flopcross