UnifiedQA TPS calculator

Open weights Allen Institute for AI,University of Washington 11B parameters May 2020

Each card below is assessed against this model at the context length and minimum quality you choose. Speed is an estimate for a single request, calculated from the card's memory bandwidth and the size of the model once compressed.

Calculated for this model

509 cards that can run it

818 cards we hold specifications for

Smallest card that fits

Xeon Phi 5110P

8 GB · IQ4_XS · 19.7 tok/s

Fastest card

B200

308 tok/s · 180 GB

Which GPUs can run UnifiedQA?

Set the inputs, read the answer

A longer conversation needs more memory, which can push this model off smaller cards.

Hides cards that would only fit the model by compressing it below this point.

509 cards match

Calculating
Needs Quantisation Fit
308 tok/s

185–493 · low confidence

B200 NVIDIA 180 GB 8,000 GB/s Jan 2024 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
308 tok/s

185–493 · low confidence

B300 NVIDIA 288 GB 8,000 GB/s Sep 2025 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
246 tok/s

148–394 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI350X AMD 288 GB 8,190 GB/s Jan 2025 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
246 tok/s

148–394 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI355X AMD 288 GB 8,190 GB/s Jan 2025 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
197 tok/s

118–315 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI300 AMD 128 GB 6,550 GB/s Jan 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
188 tok/s

113–301 · low confidence

H200 NVL NVIDIA 141 GB 4,890 GB/s Nov 2024 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
188 tok/s

113–301 · low confidence

H200 SXM 141 GB NVIDIA 141 GB 4,890 GB/s Nov 2024 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
180 tok/s

108–288 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI325X AMD 256 GB 6,000 GB/s Oct 2024 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
160 tok/s

96–256 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI300A AMD 128 GB 5,325 GB/s Dec 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
160 tok/s

96–256 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI300X AMD 192 GB 5,325 GB/s Dec 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
160 tok/s

96–256 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI308X AMD 192 GB 5,325 GB/s Dec 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
152 tok/s

91–243 · low confidence

H100 NVL 94 GB NVIDIA 94 GB 3,940 GB/s Mar 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
141 tok/s

85–225 · low confidence

CMP 170HX 8 GB NVIDIA 8 GB 1,490 GB/s Sep 2021 6.7 GB IQ4_XS Tight
129 tok/s

78–207 · low confidence

H100 PCIe 96 GB NVIDIA 96 GB 3,360 GB/s Mar 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
129 tok/s

78–207 · low confidence

H100 SXM5 80 GB NVIDIA 80 GB 3,360 GB/s Oct 2022 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
129 tok/s

78–207 · low confidence

H100 SXM5 94 GB NVIDIA 94 GB 3,360 GB/s Mar 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
129 tok/s

78–207 · low confidence

H100 SXM5 96 GB NVIDIA 96 GB 3,360 GB/s Mar 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
129 tok/s

78–207 · low confidence

H800 SXM5 NVIDIA 80 GB 3,360 GB/s Mar 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
107 tok/s

64–172 · low confidence

CMP 170HX 10 GB NVIDIA 10 GB 1,560 GB/s Sep 2021 8.6 GB Q5_K_M Tight
98.5 tok/s

59–158 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI250 AMD 128 GB 3,280 GB/s Nov 2021 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
98.5 tok/s

59–158 · low confidence

Radeon Instinct MI250X AMD 128 GB 3,280 GB/s Nov 2021 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
82.1 tok/s

49–131 · low confidence

Data Center GPU Max 1550 Intel 128 GB 3,280 GB/s Jan 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
80.3 tok/s

48–129 · low confidence

Data Center GPU Max Subsystem Intel 128 GB 3,210 GB/s Jan 2023 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
78.6 tok/s

47–126 · low confidence

A100 SXM4 80 GB NVIDIA 80 GB 2,040 GB/s Nov 2020 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable
78.6 tok/s

47–126 · low confidence

A100X NVIDIA 80 GB 2,040 GB/s Jun 2021 12.5 GB Q8_0 Comfortable

Speeds are estimates for a single request — one conversation at a time — calculated from memory bandwidth, model size and quantisation. Real throughput varies with the inference runtime and its version. Figures published by hardware vendors measure many simultaneous requests and are much higher.

On record

Full specification

Everything on record for this model. Most of it describes how it was trained rather than how it runs — useful context for judging how much work went into it, and how it compares with models built at a different scale.

Origin

Who built this model, where, and when it was published.

Organisation
Allen Institute for AI,University of Washington
Organisation type
Research collective,Academia
Country
United States of America
Published
2 May 2020
Authors
Daniel Khashabi, Sewon Min, Tushar Khot, Ashish Sabharwal, Oyvind Tafjord, Peter Clark, Hannaneh Hajishirzi

What it does

The problem areas the model was built for. A model can carry several of each.

Domain
Language
Task
Question answering
Base model
T5-11B

Size

How large the model is and how much data it was trained on. Parameters are the figure that decides whether it fits on a given graphics card.

Parameters
11B

11B from appendix A.2 : Model sizes: "Most of the experiments are done on T5(11B) which has 11 billion parameters. We also report experiments with BART (large) with 440 million parameters."

Training data
tokens

Table 2: SQuAD 1.1: 87k examples, avg total length of 136.2 + 3.0 SQuAD 2.0: 130k examples, avg total length of 139.9 + 2.6 NarrativeQA: 65k examples, avg total length of 563.6 + 6.2 RACE: 87k examples, avg total length of 317.9 + 6.9 ARC (easy): 2k examples, avg total length of 39.4 + 3.7 ARC (hard): 1k examples, avg total length of 47.4 + 5.0 OBQA: 4k examples, avg total length of 28.7 + 3.6 MCTest: 1.4k examples, avg total length of 245.4 + 4.0 BoolQ: 9k examples, avg total length of 105.1 +…

Epochs
1.88
Batch size
27

Training compute

The arithmetic performed to train the model, measured in floating-point operations. It is a measure of what the training run cost, not of how fast the finished model answers you.

Training compute
1.7 × 10¹⁹ FLOP

A.2: "In the experiments, we use v3-8 TPUs for T5 models... pretraining UNIFIEDQA approximately takes about 36 hours on T5(11B)" (Note that v3-8 refers to 8 TPUv3 cores, or 4 TPUv3 chips. From the JAX github repo: "In a TPU v3-8 you have 4 chips, 2 cores per chip, and each core has 16GB of HBM. So this looks to JAX like 8 devices with 16GB each.") 4 * 1.23e14 * 36 * 3600 * 0.3 = 1.91e19 Alternatively, input (ouput) size of 512 (100) tokens, batch size of 8, trained for 100k steps. Input tokens…

How it was established
Operation counting,Hardware
Fine-tuning compute
3.8 × 10¹⁹ FLOP

"• Infrastructure: In the experiments, we use v3-8 TPUs for T5 models, and eight 32GB GPUs for BART models. • Time spent to build UNIFIEDQA: pretraining UNIFIEDQA approximately takes about 36 and 55 hours, on T5(11B) and BART models, respectively." 8 * 123 TFLOPS * 36 * 3600 * 0.3 (utilization assumption) = 3.8e19

The training run

What it physically took to train: which chips, how many, for how long, and what that drew from the wall.

Training hardware
Google TPU v3
Chips used
8
Wall-clock time
36 hours

Appendix A.2: "pretraining UNIFIEDQA approximately takes about 36 and 55 hours, on T5(11B) and BART models, respectively."

Power draw
7.3 kW
Compute cost
$59

Availability

Whether you can obtain the model and run it on your own hardware, which is what decides if any of the graphics-card figures on this page apply.

Weights
Open — downloadable
Model access
Open weights (unrestricted)
Training code
Open source

Apache 2.0 license, includes models and training code: https://github.com/allenai/unifiedqa

Hugging Face
allenai

How it is classified

Labels the source dataset applies when tracking notable models, and how confident it is in the entry.

Why it is tracked
SOTA improvement

Table 5 "We then introduce UNIFIEDQA (§3.2) that is a QA system trained on datasets in multiple formats, indicating new state-of-the-art results on 10 datasets and generalization to unseen datasets."

Record confidence
Confident
Citations
816

Sources

Where this record came from and when it was last checked.

Reference
UnifiedQA: Crossing Format Boundaries With a Single QA System
Last updated
25 May 2026

The extremes

What the numbers mean

What it takes to run this model

Minimum card

Xeon Phi 5110P

Memory needed

6.7 GB

Fastest

308 tok/s

UnifiedQA is small enough at 11B parameters that hardware is rarely the obstacle — 509 of the cards we track can run it, including cards several years old.

The smallest card that holds it is the Xeon Phi 5110P with 8 GB, running it at IQ4_XS and producing around 19.7 tokens per second.

At the other end, a B200 generates roughly 308 tokens per second on it, on the strength of 8,000 GB/s of memory bandwidth.

About this model

UnifiedQA was published by Allen Institute for AI,University of Washington, in United States of America, in May 2020. The organisation is categorised as research collective,Academia.

It works in Language, and is recorded as doing question answering.

It is derived from T5-11B rather than trained from scratch, which is the usual way a specialised model is produced.

The weights are published, so it can be downloaded and run on your own hardware indefinitely, offline, with no account attached. It is published under the allenai organisation on Hugging Face.

How fast it runs, and why

The median result is around 21.2 tokens per second; 460 cards produce text faster than most people read it.

Being dense, it reads all of itself per token, which is why the ordering by speed below follows the ordering by memory bandwidth so closely.

Memory here is estimated from size rather than computed from the architecture, which is not recorded for this model — the numbers are indicative rather than exact.

What went into building it

The training run consumed about 1.7 × 10¹⁹ FLOP, on Google TPU v3. That figure describes the cost of creating it and has no bearing on how quickly it generates text.

It is tracked in the underlying dataset for one reason in particular: sOTA improvement.

Step by step

How to choose a GPU for UnifiedQA

The table above has already assessed every card we hold specifications for against this model. Getting to your answer takes six steps.

  1. 01

    Read the memory figure first

    Look at what UnifiedQA actually needs — around 6.7 GB at IQ4_XS. No amount of processing power compensates for a card that cannot hold it.

  2. 02

    Match the context to your actual use

    Set the context to what you will actually use. The cache grows with the conversation, and it is the usual reason UnifiedQA stops fitting a card that seemed fine.

  3. 03

    Decide how much compression you will accept

    The quantisation column varies by card, because a bigger card holds a more accurate copy of UnifiedQA — IQ4_XS on the smallest card that fits. Set a floor to hold the comparison at one level.

  4. 04

    Sort by speed

    Ranking by tokens per second for UnifiedQA follows memory bandwidth, not core counts, which is why the B200 tops it at 308 tok/s.

  5. 05

    Read the fit column last

    Tight means UnifiedQA loads and works, with no room to raise the context later. Comfortable means you can. The difference matters more than a few tokens per second.

  6. 06

    Open the card you have settled on

    Every card name links to its own page, which runs the same calculation across the whole model catalogue. Worth a look before buying for UnifiedQA alone — a card is usually bought for more than one model.

Answers

UnifiedQA — common questions

01

How much compute was used to train UnifiedQA?

Around 1.7 × 10¹⁹ FLOP, on Google TPU v3. That measures what producing the model cost and says nothing about how quickly it answers once trained — inference speed comes from memory bandwidth, not from the training budget.

02

Can I run UnifiedQA if it does not fit in my GPU?

It can be split between the card and system memory, but UnifiedQA generates painfully slowly that way — the nearest miss we calculate is short by 2.0 GB. Nothing on this page assumes offloading.

03

Would two GPUs run UnifiedQA faster?

A second card roughly doubles the memory available but not the generation rate. With 509 cards already able to run UnifiedQA alone, the case for pairing is weak.

04

Why does the quantisation differ between cards for UnifiedQA?

A larger card holds a more accurate copy. Across the cards that run UnifiedQA, 4 compression levels are used; the floor control above pins it to one.

05

How accurate are these UnifiedQA speed estimates?

These are estimates with real error bars. The fastest result here, 185–493 tok/s on the B200, could reasonably land anywhere in its published range depending on which runtime you use.

06

What GPU do I need to run UnifiedQA?

The smallest card in our catalogue that holds UnifiedQA is the Xeon Phi 5110P, with 8 GB of memory. It runs the model at IQ4_XS using about 6.7 GB, and produces roughly 19.7 tokens per second. 509 cards in total can run it.

07

How fast is UnifiedQA on a GPU?

It depends on the card. The quickest we calculate is a B200 at about 308 tokens per second; the slowest that still runs it manages considerably less. Reading speed is around ten tokens per second, and 460 of the cards that can run UnifiedQA clear that.

08

How much VRAM does UnifiedQA need?

About 6.7 GB at IQ4_XS compression, which is what the smallest card that runs it uses. Less compression needs more: the figures in the memory column above are recalculated for each card, because each one holds the least-compressed version it can.

09

Can I run UnifiedQA on a 8 GB GPU?

Yes. A CMP 170HX 8 GB with 8 GB runs it at IQ4_XS, using about 6.7 GB and generating roughly 141 tokens per second — a tight fit.

10

Can I run UnifiedQA on a 12 GB GPU?

Yes. A GeForce RTX 3080 Ti with 12 GB runs it at Q6_K, using about 9.9 GB and generating roughly 51.0 tokens per second — a tight fit.

11

Can I run UnifiedQA on a 16 GB GPU?

Yes. A Tesla V100 SXM2 16 GB with 16 GB runs it at Q8_0, using about 12.5 GB and generating roughly 43.5 tokens per second — a tight fit.

12

Can I run UnifiedQA on a 24 GB GPU?

Yes. A GeForce RTX 5090 D V2 with 24 GB runs it at Q8_0, using about 12.5 GB and generating roughly 51.6 tokens per second — a comfortable fit.

13

Is UnifiedQA open source?

Its weights are published, so UnifiedQA can be downloaded and run on your own hardware. Note that open weights is not the same as open source in the full sense — it says nothing about the training data, the training code, or the commercial terms attached.

14

How many parameters does UnifiedQA have?

UnifiedQA has 11B parameters. 11B from appendix A.2 : Model sizes: "Most of the experiments are done on T5(11B) which has 11 billion parameters. We also report experiments with BART (large) with 440 million parameters.". That figure is the total, and it is what decides how much memory the model needs — roughly half a gigabyte per billion at the compression most people use.

15

Who created UnifiedQA?

UnifiedQA was published by Allen Institute for AI,University of Washington, based in United States of America, categorised as research collective,Academia.

16

When was UnifiedQA released?

UnifiedQA was published in May 2020. Capability per parameter has improved considerably since, so a newer model of the same size is often the better use of the same hardware.

17

What is UnifiedQA used for?

UnifiedQA works in Language, and is recorded as handling question answering. Models frequently carry more than one of each, and the tags describe purpose rather than capability limits.

18

Where can I download UnifiedQA?

Its weights are published under the allenai organisation on Hugging Face. We do not host model files — this site calculates what hardware is needed to run them.

Source

Original publication

Record last updated 25 May 2026

The other direction

Looking at it from the other side?

This page starts from the model. If you already own a card and want to know everything it will run, start from the hardware instead.