Empirical Analysis of GPU Frequency Behavior Under ML Workloads

Abstract

This work presents ongoing research on the frequency-scaling behavior of NVIDIA GPUs when executing ML/AI workloads. Our preliminary findings show that, on lower-performance GPUs, the operating frequency is strongly affected by the recent workload history-typically within an 80ms window. This behavior challenges a common assumption under-lying several state-of-the-art ML latency-prediction techniques, which treat individual GPU kernel latencies as independent and therefore estimate total execution time by summing isolated per-kernel measurements. Our results indicate that such an assumption does not always hold, as the GPU's dynamic frequency scaling introduces inter-kernel dependencies. We also outline several promising directions for leveraging this observation in future work, including improved latency-prediction models, GPU kernel-reordering strategies, and NAS-driven guidelines for frequency/latency/energy-aware model design.