this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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I have no idea how this is set up to work technically, but most of the heavy lifting is gonna be on the GPU. I'm not sure that it matters much whether the browser is what's pushing data to the GPU or some other package.
Most people probably don't have a dedicated GPU and an iGPU is probably not powerfull enough to run an LLM at decent speed. Also a decent model requires like 20GB of RAM which most people don't have.
It doesn't just require 20GB of RAM, it requires that in VRAM. Which is a much higher barrier to entry.
But what if you have an AMD APU. Doesn’t that use your normal RAM as VRAM?
Not exactly. Most integrated chips have a small pool of dedicated VRAM, and then a bit more that they share with the system memory, though it's generally only a portion, not all of it. It's only Apple's unified memory, and maybe other mobile chips that has them both share memory pool entirely, for better or worse, as far as I'm aware.
But it is worth noting that if you don't have enough VRAM and have to put it into RAM, the minimum expectation is that you have twice the amount of RAM space. So if you have a GPU with 4GB of VRAM, and need to offload the extra to the system, you don't need 16 GB, you need 32 GB.