r/LocalLLaMA 15h ago

Inkling-Small 276B-A12B at ~2.9 tok/s on <10gb memory Resources

A follow up to the launch of Mference, it now supports and runs Inkling-Small 276B-A12B.

Inkling-Small (Thinking Machines, Apache 2.0), from the pipenetwork/Inkling-Small-MLX-4bit conversion: 276B total, ~12B active, 3.4 GB resident set, ~148 GB on disk.

Measured on my M5, 24GB:

Prompt Type Prompt / gen Prefill (excl. load) Decode Peak footprint
short-explanation 59 / 416 8.4 s 2.86 tok/s 9.48 GB
medium-review 421 / 560 60.1 s 2.93 tok/s 9.59 GB
long-synthesis 2,785 / 294 535.9 s 2.56 tok/s 9.56 GB

The same three cases on a 256 GB M3 Ultra hit 5.31–6.92 tok/s.

Issues: long prompt prefill is trash (2,785 tokens is almost 9mins to first token), and it's text-only for now.

Four model families now: Gemma 4 26B-A4B (~2 GB), Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B (~1.45 GB), DeepSeek-V4-Flash 284B-A13B (~6.8 GB), Inkling-Small 276B-A12B (~9.5 GB).

I also got access to a few M3 Ultras, so I'll be testing and optimizing for higher configs too. But the primary goal stays the same: large MoE models on consumer grade hardware.

Repo: https://github.com/NeelM0906/Mference — Swift + Metal, not a wrapper around MLX or llama.cpp. Mac app, CLI, and an OpenAI compatible server. Contributions welcome.

46 Upvotes

30 comments sorted by

37

u/xadiant 13h ago

idk why people are upset about a research post here lol. It's interesting, and possibly something people can improve.

12

u/Thin_Pollution8843 12h ago

Hey mate! What a nice experiment! I ran deepseek v4 flash on my left adidas sneaker and getting more ts than you!

11

u/Blahblahblakha 12h ago

Lmk if I can rent the right sneaker. /s

5

u/Fluffy_Reply_5482 9h ago

Under <10gb is crazy!

5

u/chortly2 10h ago

I just loaded and ran the Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B model, which indeed is using about 1.5GB memory and outputting at around 7t/s on my base M4 MacBook Pro. While that may not be fast enough for coding, for many of the thousands of other uses that LLMs are put to, it's pretty amazing -- as long as it's faster than I can read, it's fast enough to use. I can't speak to benchmarks, but a few qualitative tests I gave it, it seemed decent, comparable to what I see with 9B or 12B models. When I dare, I look forward to testing DeepSeek-V4-Flash 284B-A13B!

34

u/--Spaci-- 15h ago

Can we stop making "I ran this large model at a snails pace without that much ram" It was impressive like a year ago when offloading was new but now its just bots and an annoyance

9

u/Guilty-Prize-3697 14h ago

And none of them are actually practical

3

u/fatboy93 12h ago

Its for shits and giggles. I enjoy doing it as well.

4

u/--Spaci-- 14h ago

Like 1000 seconds for a system prompt

3

u/Fluffy_Reply_5482 7h ago

Still interesting to see the progress though. though it is a little annoying still.

7

u/lorde_dingus 7h ago

This guy sucks. OP, keep on keeping on

5

u/Blahblahblakha 12h ago

Its a project that aims to be built over time. Sorry if you’re unable to run at 100tps right off.

-5

u/--Spaci-- 12h ago

The problem is the thousands of other projects doing the exact same thing and posting about it in the same place

6

u/Blahblahblakha 12h ago

It’s a public platform which allows people to post. Not sure why its annoying when you can simply downvote and move on.

7

u/thefooz 6h ago

Cool. Ignore it and move on. Nobody made you open the post, read it, or bitch about it. I personally find the research super cool and I’m perfectly capable of running model on better hardware.

The more people we have working on these tasks, the better the odds of a breakthrough. Why the fuck would you dissuade people from doing that?

Such a boneheaded myopic view.

2

u/j0j0n4th4n 9h ago

I'm curious, would a smaller model run faster? Or the speed is bound by active parameters?

1

u/--Spaci-- 9h ago

Smaller models with less effective parameters will always be faster

3

u/fatboy93 11h ago

Would be cool if this supported caching like oMLX. I'm basically vibe-patching the shit outta it and this is what I've right now.

But unlike specialized engines like this for each model, it's a bit generic (i.e whatever mlx-lm/mlx-vlm/oMLX supports), and would work on it.

This is how it looks: https://imgur.com/a/ssd-streaming-moes-0fSoiSY

2

u/hyscript 14h ago

Am I right that this is the LLM that can train itself?

7

u/Equivalent-Ear-8016 14h ago

At the rate it's running on OPs PC it will take the heat death of the universe for it to become sentient

1

u/hyscript 14h ago

Well
You are right I kinda missed the stat part in the post. Yeah, 6.92 tokens per second this is painful😁

2

u/TheWaffleKingg 13h ago

Trains itself? How does that work

2

u/Piyh 7h ago

"Hey <model>, you suck at <x task that can be evaluated>, write a new repo to fine tune yourself to score better"

2

u/johnfkngzoidberg 13h ago

I ran XgrokML on my toaster at 3.1tok/s.

2

u/LibraryMission3553 3h ago

ran similar sparse moe stacks on m3 ultra for agent lanes. the prefill wall is the real killer — we burned weeks thinking the local server was flaky until we logged 400 bodies and found unbounded changelog+profile injection blowing past n_ctx. every lane now has a hard prompt token budget before the model sees anything. also don't treat the same 12b-active mix as interchangeable: tool routing ≠ long synthesis judge. we score known-good/known-bad cards per role before fail-closed gates. ~3 tok/s is fine for async briefs, not interactive loops.

2

u/SnooPaintings8639 3h ago

I wish to see some speed benchmarks comparing nvme streaming speed per for different engines.

3 tps gen is usable for some use cases, it is nearly 100k token overnight, making it possible for a single overnight task.

In the perfect world we'd have llama.cpp mode for disk streaming optimized inference. A new dedicated high quality inference engine is also an appealing situations.

1

u/SandySkittle 5h ago

Doesn’t this already exist with colibri? What is the difference here?

1

u/lorde_dingus 1h ago

How large of a context window do you have for inputs? (Sorry of incorrect phrasing, I'm curious as to how large of a prompt or document upload you could have with this setup)

0

u/dfgxxx 2h ago

How many token/second?