I'm interested in this, my impression was that the newer chips have unified memory and high memory bandwidth. Do you do inference on the CPU or the external GPU?

I don't, I'm a REALLY light user. smaller LLMs work pretty well. I used a 40gb LLM and it was _pokey_, but it worked, and switching them is pretty easy. This is a 12 core Xeon with 64Gb RAM...my M4 mini is....okay with smaller LLMs, I have a Ryzen 9 with a RTX3070ti that's the best of the bunch, but none of this holds a candle to people that spend real money to experiment in this field.