DiffusionGemma made me rethink what memory bandwidth means for local agent inference

In three linesDiffusionGemma 26B A4B inverts the bottleneck profile of autoregressive models: instead of being memory-bandwidth-bound only during decode, it is bound at every parallel denoising step (256 tokens). On 3090, it reaches 180 tok/s versus 90 tok/s for Qwen 3.5 7B. For agent workflows, parallel generation offers predictable latency independent of output length.

Summary generated by Claude — human-verified