this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
359 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
84143 readers
2451 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not at scale. Even on the new architecture, one really needs some kind of accelerator to make it economical for servers.
Bitnet-like models might change the calculus, but no major trainer had tried that yet.
Even with a bitnet, it’s almost definitely better to train on a high precision float then refine down to bits.
I would expect bitnet to require more layers for equivalent quality too.
I just meant for mass inference serving.
Yeah, I haven’t seen much in the way of bitnet training savings yet, like regular old QAT. It does appear that Deepseek is finetuning their MoEs in a 4-bit format now, though.
Yes, you can run it at scale. Which is why it uses Huawei hardware.
You can run it on anything, scaled or not
Just not power/cost efficiently on CPU only, is what I meant. CPUs don’t have the compute for batching (running generation requests in parallel). You need an accelerator, like Huawei’s, to be economical.
It’s fine for local inference, of course.
A whole ecosystem that can run on any hardware, efficiently or not, is a whole ecosystem developed for the Chinese market
…I mean, yeah? It’s obviously developed for the Chinese market.
But that’s theoretical, for now. No CPU backend I can find supports DSV4, and DeepSeek hasn’t contributed anything yet.
Yeah, I'd expect KTransformers to add support eventually, especially considering their existing support for previous DeepSeek models. One of the tricky parts is that backends need both FP8 and MXFP4 support. As far as I'm aware no inference engine supports both on CPU at the moment (llama.cpp added fp4 support recently, but doesn't have fp8, while kt-kernel doesn't support fp4 yet).
Not to speak of the new attention scheme and the (IIRC) MLP changes.
I’m very much looking forward to ik_llama.cpp implementing it. I don’t think I can quite fit Flash on my rig (hence no Ktransformers for me) but a little quantization of the sparse layers, and it’d be perfect.
Makes sense, even Flash is fairly sizable! KTransformers also has a "llamafile" backend which uses GGUFs, but ik_llama will almost certainly perform better if you're not on a NUMA setup. In my case, I'm using a dual socket motherboard, so KTransformers performs quite a bit better (I think ik_llama hasn't implemented extensive NUMA optimizations quite yet, but sounds like it's coming), though I normally use KTransformers for native FP8 weights.
LLMs are limited by memory bandwidth much more then calculating power. You need HBM. Dedicated accelerators only lower power usage.
This is commonly cited, but not strictly true.
Prompt processing is completely compute limited. And at high batch sizes, where the weights are read once for many tokens generated in parallel, token generation is also quite compute limited. Obviously you want enough bandwidth to match the compute, but its very compute heavy.
You can see this for yourself. Try ~10 prompts in parallel on a CPU in llama.cpp, and it will slow to a crawl, while a GPU with a narrow bus won't slow down much.
Training is a bit more complicated, but that's not doable on CPUs anyway.
Now, local inference (aka a batch size of 1), past prompt processing, is heavily bandwidth limited. This is why hybrid inference works alright on CPUs. But this doesn't really apply to servers, which process many users in parallel with each "pass".
Nope! You don't know what you're talking about. At all. But you can have fun running a 1.6 trillion parameter model on CPU at basically 0 tokens per second at scale, MoE or not.
https://github.com/DeepSeek-V4/deepseek-V4
You've proved my point that you don't know what you're talking about by blindly linking to the git repo. Couldn't find any source that supports your claim? I wonder why.
Sure you can serve one request at a time to one patient user at a slow token per second rate, which makes running locally viable, but there is no RAM that has the bandwidth to run this model at scale. Even flash would be incredibly slow on CPU with multiple requests. You'd need the high bandwidth of VRAM and to run across multiple GPUs in a scalable way, it requires extremely high bandwidth interconnects between GPUs.
Thank you for proving my point. It can be run on a cpu
“It’s slow, it’s inefficient” it still runs
It’s a foundational model just like R1 was.
Shift those goalposts! We went from "at scale" to "it still runs"
Quote me in full.
You can run it at scale, on huawei. You can also run it on a cpu
Okay!
Yeah, that is absolutely not what you argued.
Anyway, you've conceded that I'm correct that you cannot run it at scale on a CPU, because running on CPU is too slow and inefficient, and that they instead use GPU hardware like Huawei GPUs to run the model at scale. That's good enough for me!
Okey, then priced to just screenshot the part after the initial argument. Dude do more efforts.
Your interpretation of the English language has won you an argument! Huzzah
So good of you to concede it runs on cpu