Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

point.free

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 301 posts

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#81

Post by mr_toad »

phaser wrote: post #31

What intrigues me the most about AI progress, is not AGI or the model du jour by $AI_UNICORN, but rather what can be run locally. I remember having an amusing, but rather useless model in a beefy gaming PC that I had 6 years ago; and now, something that’s a hundred times better on my M5 laptop. Should the market react to the memory shortage, the progress of the Apple silicon continue at the same pace, and what we’ll…

This has always been true of software, particularly games. You can get a 5-6 year old game for a fraction of the price, and run it on modest hardware. But the industry wont sit on its hands for 5 years, there will be newer software that requires better hardware.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#82

Post by bobmcnamara »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #65
jansommer wrote: post #52

The E5-2620 v4 is great. Have been using it for 10 years now. Wanted to upgrade until I saw current prices. I have 64 GB ddr4. Paired it with rx 9060 xt 16 GB and games run as fast as ever. Perhaps the cpu is a slight bottleneck in DOOM The Dark Ages, but i'm at 60 fps, so no problem. Light llm on the gpu is a nobrainer, and it's cool to see that things can be tuned to run ok on the cpu. I bought 2667 v4 a month ago…

> The E5-2620 v4 is great. Have been using it for 10 years now. 10 years? Damn, that is a long time. I always assumed that heat-induced damage will kill a CPU after a certain amount of time (5-7 years). Am I wrong here? I assume yes. Or are CPUs must stronger/tougher than the bad old days?

Intel sacrificing lifetime for short-term gigahertz is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#84

Post by cmiles8 »

We’re not there yet, but the obvious endgame of the present bubble insanity is open models running on local hardware and devices are “good enough” for most use cases. That will completely implode what’s going on at the moment in tech.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#85

Post by lreeves »

Doesn't accepting 100% of the MTP draft tokens mean you should just be using the smaller model? Usually the acceptance rate in Qwen36 at least is around 60-70% and the "wrong" tokens are still filled in entirely by the base model, but when you just accept 100% of the draft tokens it seems kind of self defeating unless I'm wrong.

Also I feel like everyone leaves off prompt processing/prefill speeds in these articles. If you are using a very small prompt and asking for mostly generated tokens, sure but I'd love to know the time-to-response of asking for an analysis of an image or a few hundred lines of code.

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#86

Post by dark-star »

cafkafk wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I wrote this post after getting frustrated by the lack of ways to run the new Gemma 4 Drafter models, and mainstream tools not prioritizing this, and hiding all the performance levers. I ended up getting a modern 26B MoE model (Gemma 4) running at reading speed on an old recycled server with a single Xeon E5-2620 v4 and 128GB of DDR3 RAM (and no GPU). It took a lot of work, but it actually worked out somehow.…

Something doesn't add up here. As someone who has only recently built a home-server from an E5-26xx v2 on DDR3 RAM (because I have a sh*tload of 32g DDR3 DIMMs), I can confidently say that the newer cores (E5-26xx v3 and v4) only run on DDR4 memory...

So either you have a v2 instead of a v4 (and run on DDR3 memory), or you have a v4 but with DDR4 memory (not DDR3)

Everything else doesn't work

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#87

Post by fhars »

cafkafk wrote: post #6
fragmede wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(purple on black is really hard to read) You say it runs "at reading speed". Have you benchmarked it?

> (purple on black is really hard to read) Noted, and agree (it looks like it has also already been clicked, which I dislike). I honestly I need to redo the themes. > You say it runs "at reading speed". Have you benchmarked it? At some point a few weeks ago, yes I think so, but I didn't write it down for some reason... so I'll have to find a time when it's not busy and do it again without a noisy system. Right now th…

And if you ever run out of things to do in your copious free time, it looks like that PR #1744 was merged without the has_target_ctx assert two days after you uploaded your drafter quants. So you can now redo all your quants and rerun all your benchmarks ;-).

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#88

Post by TacticalCoder »

dark-star wrote: post #86
cafkafk wrote: post #2

Hi HN. I wrote this post after getting frustrated by the lack of ways to run the new Gemma 4 Drafter models, and mainstream tools not prioritizing this, and hiding all the performance levers. I ended up getting a modern 26B MoE model (Gemma 4) running at reading speed on an old recycled server with a single Xeon E5-2620 v4 and 128GB of DDR3 RAM (and no GPU). It took a lot of work, but it actually worked out somehow.…

Something doesn't add up here. As someone who has only recently built a home-server from an E5-26xx v2 on DDR3 RAM (because I have a sh*tload of 32g DDR3 DIMMs), I can confidently say that the newer cores (E5-26xx v3 and v4) only run on DDR4 memory... So either you have a v2 instead of a v4 (and run on DDR3 memory), or you have a v4 but with DDR4 memory (not DDR3) Everything else doesn't work

> So either you have a v2 instead of a v4 (and run on DDR3 memory), or you have a v4 but with DDR4 memory (not DDR3)

Yup that's odd... I've got a Xeon 2680 v4 (14 cores) (amazing bargain of a little beast btw) and it's indeed on DDR4 and I saw all Xeons v4 as supporting DDR4 only.

Full spec (brand/model/mobo type) would have been nice: mine's an HP Z440 workstation repurposed as a server (which I only turn on when I'm working and which I religiously turn off before going to bed).

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#89

Post by herval »

cmiles8 wrote: post #84

We’re not there yet, but the obvious endgame of the present bubble insanity is open models running on local hardware and devices are “good enough” for most use cases. That will completely implode what’s going on at the moment in tech.

this is sorta like saying that being able to run your blog on your laptop will completely implode the cloud business

Re: A 10 year old Xeon is all you need

#90

Post by tryauuum »

bflesch wrote: post #53
bflesch wrote: post #22

Might consider going for even older CPUs which don't have the Intel ME ring -3 thing which is full of backdoors

I appreciate the downvotes without any reasoning. It's a fact that newer Intel CPUs have Intel ME which was not in older CPUs and significantly increases attack surface if you are not living in a five eyes state.

How old are we talking?
Post reply on HN