Popping the GPU Bubble

GPU bubbles occur during AI model inference when the GPU sits idle waiting for the CPU to complete housekeeping tasks between token generations, since each token's GPU computation is small relative to the fixed CPU overhead of planning and launching the next step. Moondream's solution, called pipelined decoding, overlaps CPU and GPU work by launching the next forward pass while the current token is still being processed on the CPU, keeping the GPU continuously occupied. This technique uses ping-pong buffer slots and allows tokens to remain in GPU memory as input for the next step rather than requiring immediate CPU copies.