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by ProllyInfamous 25 days ago
As a hobbyist exploring LLMs since Summer 2022 (electrician by trade)... I've been as blown away by generative AI results/output as I've been left laughing at its hallucinations. My first forays were via CrAIyon & ThisWordDoesNotExist .com .

Now, four years later: I've finally been able to purchase a 5070Ti (from a ~1080Ti~ – so, an upgrade). The past few days have been overwhelming as I explore the rights/wrongs of bigger offline models (more parameters, even if They're [only] Made Out of Weights).

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My twin, an actual brilliant engineer (me: amateurhour), after playing with this new "toy" [discussing chessboard layout, electrical engineering concepts] deduced (accurately IMHO): "it's able to be wrong FASTER – don't let this be discouraging it's an incredible piece of hardware but I still cannot trust it for citing reference material." My general Qwen3:14b model was unable to troubleshoot a bespoke coding issue (as expected, it's not a code-er).

I have minimal coding experience, but he is a professional hardware engineer; I've been self-tasked to play around with "any coding model that might solve a bug I'm having with a current piece of firmware" – so that should be an interesting conceptual experience for both me and twin.

Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

3 comments

> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Start by asking the model why "whatever language atmel arduino uses" makes no sense.

Atmel is a company that makes chips, some of them are AVR some of them are ARM. The language? well, you can get a compiler and use (mostly) whatever you want, unless you are talking about the machine code.

Arduino is the software platform + dev/prototype board manufacturer.

Yes, conceptually I understand this is silly.

However, what I meant was: whatever the default programming language used when running Arduino Software Suite.

Which is "essentially C++" according to my LLM query.

> Anybody have a good coding model (it's whatever language Atmel Arduino uses, by default) that runs on a 5070Ti, best?

Atmel Arduino is mostly assembly (rarely used and assembly is generic to everything) and C. But you can’t use the usual C libraries because they are tailored to OS like Linux or Windows and the hardware those run on (i386, amd64, arm,…). That’s the primary constraint you need to implement in whatever LLM tooling you’ll be using. The majority C examples are about Linux or Windows API, not the simpler AVR standard library (the gnu one).

Other than that, on Linux and Windows, the hardware is abstracted away. For Linux, You don’t interact with the keyboard and mouse, you use libinput/x11. You don’t interact with soundcards, you use alsa/pulseaudio/pipewire,…. With AVR devices, most abstractions are only one layer deep and mostly help to avoid dealing with the boilerplate of bus protocols. You spend more time with datasheets and diagrams than with code.

Ah, a 5070.

You will find this most prescient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557728

I almost bought the 5070 (12GB), but got the 5070Ti (16GB), instead. It is MUCH FASTER than the non-Ti [1], and can run a multitude-more local LLMs:

<https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5070-ti.c4...>

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-5070.c4218

I really wish NVIDIA would name their products better (e.g. the 5070Ti is closer to a 5080 than a 5070, in performance).

[1] Just as examples: 136 tok/s Llama3.1:8b; 65 tok/s Qwen3.5:9B; PoExile 4k@144Hz... it can do each while the majority of the CPU cores mine Monero =P