LLM Inference at the Edge: Mobile, NPU, and GPU Performance Efficiency Trade-offs Under Sustained Load

Deploying large language models on-device for always-on personal agents demands sustained inference from hardware tightly constrained in power, thermal envelope, and memory. We benchmark Qwen 2.5 1.5B (4-bit quantised) across four platforms: a Raspberry Pi 5 with Hailo-10H NPU, a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, an iPhone 16 Pro, and a laptop NVIDIA RTX 4050 GPU. Using a fixed 258-token prompt over 20 warm-condition iterations per device, we measure throughput, latency, power, and thermal behaviour. For mobile platforms, thermal management supersedes peak compute as the primary constraint: the iPhone 16 Pro loses nearly half its throughput within two iterations, and the S24 Ultra suffers a hard OS-enforced GPU frequency floor that terminates inference entirely. On dedicated hardware, distinct constraints dominate: the RTX 4050 is bounded by its battery power ceiling, while the Hailo-10H is limited by on-module memory bandwidth. The RTX 4050 sustains 131.7 tok/s at 34.1 W; the Hailo-10H sustains 6.9 tok/s at under 2 W with near-zero variance, matching the RTX 4050 in energy proportionality at 19× lower throughput. Results should be interpreted as platform-level deployment characterisations for a single model and prompt type, reflecting hardware and software combined, rather than general claims about hardware capability alone.

Results

Simplified summary — see the paper for full methodology, error bars, and per-run data.

The headline result: no single platform wins outright. Each occupies a distinct throughput/power/stability point, and mobile devices are gated by thermals long before they're gated by raw compute.