[berkut]

In my experience with llama.cpp using the CPU (on Linux) is very slow compared to GPU or NPU with the same models as my M1 MacBook Pro using Metal (or maybe it's the shared memory allowing the speedup?).

Even with 12 threads of my 5900X (I've tried using the full 24 SMT - that doesn't really seem to help) with the dolphin-2.5-mixtral-8x7b.Q5_K_M model, my MacBook Pro is around 5-6x faster in terms of tokens per second...

[ilaksh]

I think that Metal or something is actually a built in graphics/matrix accelerator that those Macs have now. It's not really using a CPU although it seems like Apple may be trying to market it a little bit as though it's just a powerful CPU. But more like accelerator integrated with CPU.

But whatever it is, it's great, and I hope that Intel and AMD will catch up.

AMD has had the APUs for awhile but I think they aren't at the same level at all as the new Mac acceleration.

[stavros]

There must be something wrong, my 3060 does double the tokens per second as my M2 Mac (with Metal).