I feel like most hardware to run LLMs on is shaped wrong for individuals.

It's either having a model struggling along with like 5-10 tokens per second on unified memory, or data center cards with hundreds of GB of VRAM consuming more than a kW of power. It doesn't seem like there's prosumer GPUs with like 180W-250W TDP and 128 GB or 256 GB of VRAM (one can dream). Then bifurcation and even just two of those cards would be kinda useful (albeit NVLink or equivalent would need to be commonplace).

Obviously nobody is running Kimi K3 locally without an insanely beefy homelab and lots of money to burn, but running GLM 5.2 would be cool at like ~100 tokens per second for a single session and maybe ~60 tokens per second with N subagents.

How unfortunate.

I have found that the "mostly didn't lose anything" Q8 large models that I want to run are all too large to run on the "only $3995!" 128GB max RAM systems that some people are buying, and definitely won't fit with any usable amount of context. Things like Qwen 3.5 122B Q8 or deepseek v4 flash Q8, or Laguna S 2.1 Q8 need 170-190GB of RAM including full context, which fits on a 256GB RAM dual socket workstation or rackmount server (sans GPU).

Copy and paste below from my notes and reported memory consumption with latest llama-server, assuming use of "--no-mmap" to load the entire thing into RAM at the time that llama-server launches.

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-UD-Q4_K_XL via unsloth 145GB on disk GGUF 0.03.323.204 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 178175 MiB of host memory

DeepSeek-V4-Flash-UD-Q8_K_XL via unsloth 151GB on disk GGUF 0.02.215.885 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 184636 MiB of host memory

Laguna-S-2.1-UD-Q8_K_X via unsloth 120GB on disk 0.01.616.119 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 172860 MiB of host memory

Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-UD-Q8_K_XL via unsloth 160GB on disk GGUF 165GB RAM use on launch, fresh context 0.04.976.905 I common_params_fit_impl: projected to use 170038 MiB of host memory

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.

I've been feeling for a while that as we keep increasing model size, we're going through the opposite of the PC revolution.

The "democratisation" talk from the frontier labs is especially egregious when they only release closed models (gpt-oss hardly counts) and are trying everything they can to make it harder to run open models.

Yeah, I've been experimenting with DiffusionGemma which sadly isn't as smart as Gemma itself, but holy hell is it FAST, and has image input as well, so doing things like "take a screenshot once per second + ask the model to categorize/model it WITH reasoning before" becomes realistic and doable.

I ended up implementing DiffusionGemma myself with Candle in Rust + CUDA, and it's quite literally the fastest model I've managed to run on my hardware.

The next mac Ultra will allow to run a big model locally with acceptable speed. But we need people to optimize it for that computer, and we’ll be more limited in models we can choose from

128GB is enough to run a large model, quantized, REAPed, with MoE and fast SSD for model weights

> like 180W-250W TDP > running GLM 5.2 would be cool at like ~100 tokens per second for a single session

Your power consumption estimates are off for this generation of GPUs. A 27B dense model gets 50-80 tps on an RTX 6000 using 600 watts.

I agree but worth noting that it's never gonna be very practical to run LLMs like this at home. Unless we have some sort of design breakthrough, the only "sensible" way to run them is at high batch levels on shared HW.

Like, yeah if I could spend a few grand on such a GPU I probably would coz I'm a rich nerd, but I'd acknowledge it as an extremely inefficient luxury, kinda like a sports car.

So I think you could say the real misfortune is that we don't really have the technology (be it computer tech or political/social tech) to do that shared-HW thing in way we can truly trust.

RTX Spark does go up to 128gb No idea how it compares tho

You're right, and it's interesting to consider why. It's probably a combination of a few factors:

1) Local LLMs are a relatively new phenomenon and hardware takes years. Apple probably lucked into their unified memory architecture being suitable (in terms of memory size and bandwidth) for local LLMs, but it's only with the newest generations we're hearing about LLMs even being a consideration in their design process.

2) NVidia seem to be deliberately blocking consumers from taking this path - as evidenced by the removal of NVLink from the 30x0 series onwards - probably to protect their data center cards from internal competition?

3) Perhaps there's just not the market for it? It's feasible that the number of nerds interested local LLMs is very small in numbers, sales, and profit potential compared to gamers on the one side, and data centers on the other. (This would explain why AMD and Intel aren't trying to out-innovate NVidia in this area, despite it being an obvious opportunity.)

The individual-shaped-hardware problem gets even sharper at the phone end. Shipping a 3B model on-device, the usable RAM budget after the OS and everything else is more like 2-4GBtotal, not per-model so it's not 'can I afford more VRAM', it's 'can I fit a language model and an STT model and embeddings without the OS killing my process'. Feels like phones are the most hardware-constrained 'individual' tier and get the least airtime in these kind of discussion. Is that because the models that fit are still too limited to be interesting, or something else?