But honestly, the biggest advantage of llama.cpp for me is being able to split a model so performantly. My puny 16GB laptop can just barely, but very practically, run LLaMA 30B at almost 3 tokens/s, and do it right now. That is crazy!
With a single NVIDIA 3090 and the fastest inference branch of GPTQ-for-LLAMA https://github.com/qwopqwop200/GPTQ-for-LLaMa/tree/fastest-i..., I get a healthy 10-15 tokens per second on the 30B models. IMO GGML is great (And I totally use it) but it's still not as fast as running the models on GPU for now.
Its comparable to Apache TVM's vulkan in speed on cuda, see https://github.com/mlc-ai/mlc-llm
But honestly, the biggest advantage of llama.cpp for me is being able to split a model so performantly. My puny 16GB laptop can just barely, but very practically, run LLaMA 30B at almost 3 tokens/s, and do it right now. That is crazy!