Benchmark roadmap — what we want measured

The single-5090 baseline is the comparison anchor for every multi-GPU recommendation on this site. Without it, the 'should I just buy one bigger card?' question can't be answered with confidence.

Snapdragon 8 Elite is the mid-2025 flagship for Android on-device LLM inference. Establishing the NPU-vs-GPU-fallback tradeoff numbers is critical for the Android-on-device guidance.

Mobile on-device LLM viability is the most-asked question in the iPhone-developer ecosystem in 2026. A measured tok/s + battery drain + thermal throttling curve answers 'can I ship this in my app?'

DeepSeek V4 Flash with the MTP head is claimed to be the throughput leader. Verifying the MTP advantage on production hardware is high-value for V4-Pro-vs-V4-Flash decision-making.

The Apple-vs-NVIDIA comparison at the frontier-MoE tier is the most-asked question for Mac Studio buyers. Editorial estimate is 25-30% of NVIDIA throughput; measured value would close the loop.

The frontier-MoE production reference. Organizations weighing $200k+ DGX-class purchases vs cloud rental need measured throughput to model cost-per-million-tokens accurately.

Pairs with the dual-3090 measurement to quantify the NVLink-vs-PCIe penalty. The 4090 NVLink absence is the single most-misunderstood spec gap; a measured comparison ends the speculation.

The dual-3090 NVLink build is the most-recommended prosumer multi-GPU configuration on this site. Without a measured benchmark, the 25-32 tok/s estimate carries editorial-only confidence — operators making $1,500+ buying decisions deserve real numbers.

MLC LLM is cross-platform and the most-deployed mobile LLM runtime. The Adreno-vs-Hexagon comparison on the same SoC determines whether NPU lock-in is worth the throughput gain.

Tablet-class on-device viability for journaling / long-form summarization. Needs the throttle curve, not just peak tok/s.

Lunar Lake is the Intel reference for Copilot+ PCs. Comparison vs Snapdragon X NPU determines which Copilot+ chip operators should prefer for on-device LLMs.

Copilot+ PC ecosystem is rapidly expanding. The Snapdragon X NPU vs Lunar Lake NPU vs CPU-fallback comparison is the operator decision for Windows on-device deployments.

Distributed-serving patterns differ from tensor-parallel — replicas scale aggregate concurrency, not single-stream model size. The concurrency scan reveals where Ray Serve replicas plateau.

Multi-Mac Exo clusters are an emerging pattern. The cluster-vs-single-Mac-Studio comparison establishes whether the cluster is ever the right answer outside extreme memory targets.

Quad-3090 is the prosumer-ceiling stack. R1 reasoning workloads are a high-traffic use case but the thinking-mode token bloat changes the throughput calculation — needed to set realistic operator expectations.

Research-tier benchmark — mixed-GPU is editorial-discouraged for new builds. Useful for users who already own asymmetric pairs.