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Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

lemonade-server.ai

11–20 of 133 posts

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#11

Surprising that the Linux setup instructions for the server component don't include Docker/Podman as an option, its Snap/PPA for Ubuntu and RPM for Fedora. Maybe the assumption is that container-oriented users can build their own if given native packages?

They do have some container options, though I definitely think they should be added to the release page: https://lemonade-server.ai/install_options.html#docker

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#12

Note that the NPU models/kernels this uses are proprietary and not available as open source. It would be nice to develop more open support for this hardware.

Are they? The docs say "You can also register any Hugging Face model into your Lemonade Server with the advanced pull command options"

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#15
Feels like this is sitting somewhere between Ollama and something like LM Studio, but with a stronger focus on being a unified “runtime” rather than just model serving.

The interesting part to me isn’t just local inference, but how much orchestration it’s trying to handle (text, image, audio, etc). That’s usually where things get messy when running models locally.

Curious how much of this is actually abstraction vs just bundling multiple tools together. Also wondering if the AMD/NPU optimizations end up making it less portable compared to something like Ollama in practice.

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#16

Note that the NPU models/kernels this uses are proprietary and not available as open source. It would be nice to develop more open support for this hardware.

Are they? The docs say "You can also register any Hugging Face model into your Lemonade Server with the advanced pull command options"

That won't give you NPU support, which relies on https://github.com/FastFlowLM/FastFlowLM . And that says "NPU-accelerated kernels are proprietary binaries", not open source.

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#17
post #9

I’ve read the website and the news announcement, and I still don’t understand what it is. An alternative to LM Studio? Does it support MLX or metal on Macs? I’m assuming it will optimize things for AMD, but are you at a disadvantage using other GPUs?

I think LM Studio itself uses other software to actually make use of LLMs. If that other software does not support your NPUs, then you are not going to get much performance out of those. This Lemonade thing I am guessing is one such other software, that LM Studio could be using.

Re: Lemonade by AMD: a fast and open source local LLM server using GPU and NPU

#20
I’m looking forward to trying this currently Strix halo’s npu isn’t accessible if you’re running Linux, and previously I don’t think lemonade was either. If this opens up the npu that would be great! Resolute raccoon is adding npu support as well.
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