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schmorptrontoday at 11:06 AM1 replyview on HN

LLM inference unfortunately also seems to be a task that's poorly formed for moderate consumer hardware,as a single user. For a single user use case, the load is bursty but requires the weights to be in memory already. So a multi user server that keeps the model weights in parts of its memory and then spends some more per user kv cache is wildly more efficient and the wildly expensive gpu cores aren't just sitting idle most of the time. Don't get me wrong, most desktop workloads are bursty, but the power needed to to them has gotten cheap enough that we can have way overkill for idle scenarios hardware just sitting on our desks.


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zozbot234today at 11:17 AM

Why does it have to be so bursty though? Just let it run multiple continuous-batched inferences overnight. This would work especially well in combination with SSD offload, and given any kind of sparse attention (common in more recent models) even swapping out the KV cache itself to disk might ultimately be a win. I wouldn't be surprised if something like that ultimately became feasible for single users running even K3 itself.

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