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Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by shujito on Thursday November 12, 2026 @11:46AM (#50470249)
perhaps the pi 1st/2nd gen?

I'd thought of the ESP32 devices but their RAM is too small

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by gabucino on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:07PM (#50470583)
Pi 1 is too easy. My PicoLM [fork] already runs on it.

It also runs on MS-DOS 80386 2MB RAM, so...

And iPhone 1. And Digital UNIX.

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mrashad74 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @12:55PM (#50471339)
Raspberry Pis in general are too easy for this task they don't even need modifications, older iphones seem more interesting due to some work on comptability.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by saturn8601 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:03PM (#50474964)
Machines with unified ram work better? whats the bare minimum Ram you need? Maybe those old SGI or Sun machines could have a second life. SGI boxes made the Terminator come to life on the big screen so now their second act could be to help bring the real terminator to life :P
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by aa-jv on Friday November 13, 2026 @05:12AM (#50481129)
Yes please, my Indy, O2 and Octane2 are all sitting there waiting for some hot Terminator LLM action.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by tslmy on Friday November 13, 2026 @01:21PM (#50487556)
Try an iPod Touch 4th gen? IIRC it's the last model that doesn't support anything higher than iOS 6, so it would be fun to have a local LLM running in a native app that speaks skeuomorphism.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by saturn8601 on Thursday November 12, 2026 @05:01PM (#50474944)
I have a basement full of Pentium 4-Core 2 Quad machines lying around. Has anyone strung together machines of this era to make something work? I always imagined that even if I were able to provide something like 4-8GB of ram per box the token speed would be measured in tok/hr or something.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by gabucino on Thursday November 12, 2026 @10:34PM (#50477898)
the thing that kills them is the complete lack of any kind of matmul instructions. With my PicoLM fork it's possible to "play" GPT-2-AIdungeon on an iBook PowerPC 1.2Ghz with 1GB RAM (scalar instructions, as I said), but it's only for men of the more... patient variety.

Even a Pi 3 is a no-go for any model of consequence. At the very least get a Pi 4 or old ARM phones with NEON.

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mrashad74 on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:37AM (#50479697)
ipad Air I tried doesn't have matmul, but there are tricks you can do to work around it actually.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mrashad74 on Friday November 13, 2026 @12:55AM (#50478913)
this kind of old processors are smth I want to explore honestly, I don't know if the processor capabilities will allow smth interesting to happen or not, but they're for sure on my target list.

I think realistically smth around 5tok/sec is possible with them for 2B models or so if you provided enough ram for streaming. worth a shot

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mikeayles on Thursday November 12, 2026 @06:19PM (#50475819)
I was looking for the lowest claim in this thread, as I managed to get a nano LLM running in the ≈3mb of SRAM of an FPGA with zero DDR in the loop at 20k tok/s, but 2mb on a 80386, great job.

Have you got a write up for it?

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mrashad74 on Friday November 13, 2026 @02:47AM (#50479798)
I ran YOLO on an FPGA for my bachlor's project degree project like 7 years ago, but this is even more interesting, and I think we can push bigger models with weight streaming. I still have an FPGA lying around.
Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mikeayles on Friday November 13, 2026 @04:49AM (#50480892)
I haven't written a new blog post for it yet but there's currently a demo live of my FPGA running bonsai 8b on the same FPGA here

https://www.mikeayles.com/blog/on-chip-llm-kv260/

Its right up against the wall of DDR bandwidth, so I'm trying every trick in the book to get the speed up

Re:I'm making LLMs work on small and old devices by mrashad74 on Friday November 13, 2026 @06:40AM (#50482100)
Decent!! Also I love the idea of the live chat, would you mind if I put a reference to it on my repo?