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DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

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Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#61
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

"Data centers for LLMs are technically more energy efficient per-user than self-hosting LLM models due to economies-of-scale" is a data point the internet isn't ready for.

This is pretty much true for all applications.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#62
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

"Data centers for LLMs are technically more energy efficient per-user than self-hosting LLM models due to economies-of-scale" is a data point the internet isn't ready for.

If LLM's were a mature product then this would be true at some point. However, you could argue (and I will) that the popularization of on-device LLM inference will lead to two things:

- Consumers of LLM inference (developers and hobbyists) will be more aware of compute cost, leading them to develop more token-efficient uses of LLM inference and be incentivized to pick the right model for the right job (instead of throwing Sonnet at the wall and follow up with Opus if that doesn't stick)

- A larger market for on-device (and therefore open weight) LLM's will probably result in more research concentrated on those inherently more efficient (because compute/memory-constrained) models.

I think that despite the inefficiencies, shifting the market towards local inference would be a net positive in terms of energy use. Remember that 50W might seem like a lot, but is still much less than what, let's say, a PS5 draws.

Also remember how AWS had the same promise and now we're just deploying stack after stack and need 'FinOps' teams to get us to be more resource-efficient?

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#63
post #45
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most tasks do not require frontier models, so as long as these models cover 95-99 per cent of the tasks, closed frontier models can be left for niche and specialized cases that are harder.

Frontier models can hardly do the tasks I want them too, I simply cannot buy into this notion.

For instance?

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#64
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

It's so interesting to think about how much power it takes these machines to "think". I think I had a vague notion that it was "a lot" but it's good to put a number on it. If DS4 Flash peaks at 50W and is 280B parameters, does that mean DS4 Pro at 1.6T parameters would likely be 300W or so? And the latest GPT 5 and Opus which feel maybe comparable-ish around 500W? Is it fair to say that when I'm using Claude Code and…

Batching lowers that, since the model is read once from memory. Activation accumulation doesn't scale as nicely

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#65
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

It's so interesting to think about how much power it takes these machines to "think". I think I had a vague notion that it was "a lot" but it's good to put a number on it. If DS4 Flash peaks at 50W and is 280B parameters, does that mean DS4 Pro at 1.6T parameters would likely be 300W or so? And the latest GPT 5 and Opus which feel maybe comparable-ish around 500W? Is it fair to say that when I'm using Claude Code and…

Power isn't proportional to parameters. It may be vaguely proportional to tokens/s although batching screws that up.

Claude Sonnet is probably running on a 8 GPU box that consumes 10 kW while Opus might use more like 50 kW but that's shared by a bunch of users thanks to batching.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#66
post #42
post #37

Large LLMs on MacBook produce tokens at an acceptable speed but the problem is reading context. Not incremental reading like when you have a chat session, because they use KV cache, but large size reading, like when you paste a big file. It can take minutes.

And unless I'm mistaken, the repo is about running it with 2bit quantization. This is probably far from the raw intelligence provided by cloud providers. Still, this shines more light on local LLMs for agentic workflows.

It runs both q2 and original (4 bit routed experts). At the same speed more or less. The q2 quants are not what you could expect: it works extremely well for a few reasons. For the full model you need a Mac with 256GB.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#67
post #56
post #36

Heh, I made something very similar for the Qwen3 models a while back. It only runs Qwen3, supports only some quants, loads from GGUF, and has inference optimized by Claude (in a loop). The whole thing is compact (just a couple of files) and easy to reason about. I made it for my students so they could tinker with it and learn (add different decoding strategies, add abliteration, etc.). Popular frameworks are large, c…

This takes me to the famous FizzBuzz High performance codegolf answer [1]. If we could implement optimizations like that for the inferences, maybe we could increase the speeds 10x or more. [1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr...

I love scrolling and reading through this, thinking yeah of course Python is slower than Java, oh wow Rust is pretty on par I wonder what the Java devs did. Then you hit asm and your jaw drops.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#68
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

It's so interesting to think about how much power it takes these machines to "think". I think I had a vague notion that it was "a lot" but it's good to put a number on it. If DS4 Flash peaks at 50W and is 280B parameters, does that mean DS4 Pro at 1.6T parameters would likely be 300W or so? And the latest GPT 5 and Opus which feel maybe comparable-ish around 500W? Is it fair to say that when I'm using Claude Code and…

Energy use for any given request is going to be roughly proportional to active parameters, not total. That would be something like 13B for Flash and 49B for Pro. So you'd theoretically get something like 190W if you could keep the same prefill and decode speed as Flash, which is unlikely.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#69
post #15

A random, funny, interesting and telling data point: my MacBook M3 Max while DS4 is generating tokens at full speed peaks 50W of energy usage...

"Data centers for LLMs are technically more energy efficient per-user than self-hosting LLM models due to economies-of-scale" is a data point the internet isn't ready for.

But if you're running it on your own hardware you might only generate tokens when you have something useful to do with them, instead of every time you load a Google search results page because Google decided the future is stuffing Gemini-generated answers down your eyeballs instead of letting you read it yourself from the primary source for 0.1 watts.

Re: DeepSeek 4 Flash local inference engine for Metal

#70
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This takes me to the famous FizzBuzz High performance codegolf answer [1]. If we could implement optimizations like that for the inferences, maybe we could increase the speeds 10x or more. [1] https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/215216/high-thr...

I love scrolling and reading through this, thinking yeah of course Python is slower than Java, oh wow Rust is pretty on par I wonder what the Java devs did. Then you hit asm and your jaw drops.

Check out cpp at 208.3 GiB/s, 3x faster than asm.
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