Beyond Prefill and Decode: Disaggregation Moves from Tokens to Frames
Intel, Tuesday, September 15th, 2026
Intel extends disaggregated inference beyond text prefill and decode into multimodal frame-level processing.
Intel describes how disaggregated inference architectures, which separate prefill and decode stages onto different hardware, are being extended to multimodal workloads operating on video frames.
The article explains why frame processing has different memory and compute profiles than token generation, and how splitting the pipeline improves utilization.
Intel outlines the scheduling and interconnect implications for data center deployments. Performance characteristics for its own accelerator and CPU combinations are discussed.