I will be watching llama.cpp closely for them to implement this!
I’ve been looking for ways to speed up CPU inference and I really like this idea of “effort”
The name was proposed by chatgpt :) It claims it doesn't recognise this approach - so there is a chance it's really a new thing.
I want to reach out to llama.cpp and the others - I hope it gets implemented. I considered just writing a patch to llama, but c++ and the scale of that project was beyond me.
As for CPU inference - it should speed it up just as well. But thanks to the fact that it can load up a fraction of weights (e.g. just 70%, skipping the least important ones), it should be possible now to run models on less VRAM than before (still, Q8 needs to implemented though).
Funnily - when I tried comparing benchmarks to llama.cpp, I couldn't find speeds for 7B/FP16 on MB Air 16GB, because it's impossible to run with regular methods. It is possible with Effort.
Ditto, I was running full resolution, but cropped, Mixtral on my 96GB M2, even though it usually takes 114GB ram. I just loaded 75% of weights, and it was working smoothly. (before I messed something up with implementation and it now produces crap output - needs a fix)
A bit technical explaination here. https://kolinko.github.io/effort/equations.html
"All things are possible with enough effort." -- Dad.
The author here, open for comments :)