fox 2026-05-21: 'we dont touch card during retrieval'. Retrieval + verify
are CPU/SQLite on the orchestrator; the GPU is idle (at the shared, always-
on model-resident floor) during them. So the substrate does NOT 'hold the
card' through its wall-clock — the gross window integral over-counts by
charging that always-on floor for the seconds we spend retrieving (energy
that exists regardless of the query; the card serves other traffic then).
Correct attribution: the GPU cost of a query is its GENERATION energy only
(the marginal — burst above the serving floor). Relabel: marginal is the
headline GPU COGS; gross is demoted to a reference 'window total, not
query-attributable'. Print + energy_cogs docstring + stock-v1-config doc
updated. No math change (marginal was already right) — this corrects the
narration. Measured qwen-nothink/4090: substrate GPU COGS is LOW
(claim_lattice $0.21/M-tok, quote $0.83) — its real overhead is latency
(CPU retrieval), not GPU watts.
russell@unturf.com
32aeb37086