alt Hacker NewsUntil RAM prices drop and can economically get machines with 256GB, 512GB and higher bandwidth... I frankly think the local AI story is going to be still fairly muted for most people.
My Spark can do Qwen3.6 MoE A3B at 60 to 70-ish token/second and that's really good, but there's limits the usefulness of that model. It's not useful for coding, in any case.
Once people can run something like GLM 5.2 at lower quants (512GB could do a passable job), then I think the story changes.
Whether we ever see DRAM as cheap as it was ever again, I don't know.
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Part of me wonders, would 3d xpoint (if still around) be a viable option?
Yeah it is slower than real RAM by a good amount for latency, but you can get similar bandwidth and the cost was history about half of the same size DDR.
Agree - the 128GB Strix Halo is capable if you use LLMs as assistants, but it's not so good if you use LLMs as agents (or worse, agent teams/swarms) since all of the models that can fit on it are pretty dumb compared to frontier or near-frontier models. You can at best hope for Sonnet-level capabilities.
That doesn't mean that local models are useless though! If Mythos/Sol is an ASI that threatens to take your job and turn you into paperclips, then Qwen/Gemma is an old-fashioned office secretary that loyally helps you with tasks but doesn't have a good grasp of details. Every white-collar worker 50 years ago would have killed to have a hard-working personal secretary.