0.2 tok/s is fine for experimentation, but it is not interactive in any meaningful sense. For many use cases, a well-quantized 8B or 13B that stays resident will simply deliver a better latency-quality tradeoff
yeah, actually I wanted to see if this was possible at all. I managed to get around 3000 tokens/s on a ps2 with classic transformers, since the emotion engine is capable of 32 bit addresses, but it has like 32gb of ram. So I ran into the question of why was that fast and I couldn't get that speed even with small models, and the deal is that the instructions went right of the memory to the gpu and that's the main difference that does when a regular computer does inference: it has to request the instructions to the cpu every time. As I mentioned too, on professional cards you can avoid these problems naturally, since they got instructions precisely for this, but sadly I don't have 30k bucks to spare on a gpu :(
The $5/hr B200 rate is fine for training, but cloud latency usually breaks real-time signal processing. I’ve been hitting similar walls with MemeRadar; when you're processing high-volume spikes, the bottleneck is memory bandwidth, not raw TFLOPS. Quantizing to fit L3 cache is an option, but you lose the precision needed for spotting subtle rug-pull patterns. For 24/7 production workloads, local hardware TCO usually beats cloud rentals.
You can get lots of tokens per second on the CPU if the entire network fits in L1 cache. Unfortunately the sub 64 kiB model segment isn't looking so hot.
But actually ... 3000? Did GP misplace one or two zeros there?
I wondered the same, but the rendering seems right, the output was almost instant. I'll recheck the token counter; anyway as you say, fast isn't practical. Actually I had to develop my own tiny model https://huggingface.co/xaskasdf/brandon-tiny-10m-instruct to fit something "usable", and it's basically a liar or disinformation machine haha
I can imagine a couple scenarios in which a high-quality, large model would be much preferred over lower latency models, primarily when you need the quality.
I didn't really understand the performance table until I saw the top ones were 8B models.
But 5 seconds / token is quite slow yeah. I guess this is for low ram machines? I'm pretty sure my 5950x with 128 gb ram can run this faster on the CPU with some layers / prefill on the 3060 gpu I have.
I also see that they claim the process is compute bound at 2 seconds/token, but that doesn't seem correct with a 3090?
DRAM speeds is one thing, but you should also account for the data rate of the PCIe bus (and/or VRAM speed). But yes, holding it "lukewarm" in DRAM rather than on NVMe storage is obviously faster.
Four channels of DDR4-3200 vs two channels of DDR5-6400 (four subchannels) should come out pretty close. I don't see any reason why the DDR4 configuration would be consistently faster; you might have more bank groups on DDR4, but I'm not sure that would outweigh other factors like the topology and bandwidth of the interconnects between the memory controller and the CPU cores.
LLama 3.1 however is not MoE, so all params are active.
For MoE it is tricky, because for each token you only use a subset of params (an “expert”) but you don’t know which one, so you have to keep them all in memory or wait until it loads from slower storage, potentially different for each token.