Good question. Yes, it affects. My experiment reproduces a performance benchmark in the original paper. The benchmark also uses adjusted batch size to maximize throughput regardless of the model accuracy.

In our experiments, we mea- sured the effects of pipeline parallelism and recomputation on the model throughput of ResNet-101 and AmoebaNet-D (4, 512). We fixed the image size at 224 × 224. We adjusted the mini-batch size to maximize the throughput.