[bufo]

It was pretty hard to saturate the memory bandwidth on the M2 on the CPU side (not sure about the GPU).

[brucethemoose2]

The GPU can saturate it for sure.

Llama.cpp is a pretty extreme cpu ram bus saturator, but I dunno how close it is (and its kind of irrelevant because why wouldn't you use a Metal backend).

[sunpazed]

Well, Metal can only allocate a smaller portion of “VRAM” to the GPU — about 70% or so, see; https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/tech-talks/10580

If you want to run larger models, then CPU inference is your only choice.

[__loam]

Aren't these things supposed to have cores dedicated to ml?

[azinman2]

You’re thinking of the neural engine. I’m not sure that llama.cpp makes use of this. They’d have to turn it into a CoreML model to do so.

[brucethemoose2]

They are not as fast as the GPU (but much lower power).

Also, not many implementations can even use it.