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GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

unsloth.ai

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Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#231

I run Q4_K_XL. All it takes to run to get about 6tk/sec is 512gb of ram and 2 3090 GPUs with llama.cpp -cmoe. I also have crappy DDR4, 2400mhz, 3200mhz will bring that speed up to about 9tk/sec. I also have ok 32core epyc CPU, a better 64core would bring it up to about 11tk/sec. I did a budget build before the crazy hardware cost and I regret it everyday. Nevertheless, it's fantastic being able to run this model at h…

Running that full load is at least 600 W, so in a day ~14 kWh. At $0.2 a kWH, that would be $2.80/day or $1k a year of op-ex in electricity. Unless you really want privacy or the fuzzy feeling of owning your own, it’s cheaper, more convenient and has much faster tok/s if you pay a hyper scaler. That said, I do like the direction we are heading and look forward to seeing what host your own hardware we get in 2 years.

Depends on whether you've also gone for self-hosted electricity generation or not.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. I could easily see a company deciding to host and run these models for their own development. If you have a dev team of about 10 people, a one time $50k investment in an LLM server has to be pretty tempting. Unlimited tokens, decent performance, upgrade options, and potential product integrations. For companies wanting LLMs in their products in general, I have to think going the local llm route is e…

Where is $50k coming from again?

$50K seems low if you want to run, say, GLM 5.2 4bit fast enough for a team for devs.

You need something like 6x RTX Pro 6000 at $11800 each plus a nice server (add $10000) = $80800 and then quite a bit of electricity.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#233
post #101
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AMD 395 supports up to 128GB unified RAM. So still not enough even at 1-bit quant unfortunately.

96gb vram is the max it supports.

That's the max you can statically allocate in the BIOS. It's best to leave that at the minimum (500 MB I think), and let the drivers dynamically allocate. You can use up to about 120 GB on Linux.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#234
DwarfStar work in progress numbers: I see 14 tokens/sec generation, that slopes to 10 t/s with longer 10k or more context size. Consider that the indexed attention requires evaluating 2048 selected rows, 2x DeepSeek and with less compression, so the performances with larger contexts here to south faster. Prefill can be 180 t/s on small contexts to 150 t/s and less with larger contexts. I used DeepSeek v4 PRO in this conditions, it is usable but it is far from the 35 t/s 400 t/s prefill you get with DeepSeek v4 Flash 2 bit on a MacBook m5 max. But likely my implementation is yet not optimized enough, so a bit more performance can be obtained. I'm using 4 bit quants. The model is also definitely less sparse than DeepSeek v4, so it activates a bigger percentage of parameters. If it works decently at 2-bit, that would be a win even for machines where 4-bit fits, since this would mean 2x memory (equivalent) bandwidth basically for the routed experts.

Local inference needs really hard a 1.2 / 1.5 T/s memory bandwidth system with 512GB and 2/3 times the GPU compute of Mac Studio M3 Ultra, at an affordable 10/15k price point. A variant with 1TB memory would also be welcomed at 20k price point.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#235

I run Q4_K_XL. All it takes to run to get about 6tk/sec is 512gb of ram and 2 3090 GPUs with llama.cpp -cmoe. I also have crappy DDR4, 2400mhz, 3200mhz will bring that speed up to about 9tk/sec. I also have ok 32core epyc CPU, a better 64core would bring it up to about 11tk/sec. I did a budget build before the crazy hardware cost and I regret it everyday. Nevertheless, it's fantastic being able to run this model at h…

AIUI the llama.cpp implementation for this model is still quite half-baked due to missing the support for DSA sparse attention mechanism. This leads to running the model with a different mechanism that it has not been trained for, which has been shown to lead to lower quality and performance. Anyway, I think GLM 5.2 in many ways is not as interesting as DeepSeek V4 series, which uses an even more advanced attention m…

Particularly DeepSeek 4.1, which they appear to be A/B testing on the API and which also seems available on the free chat interface.

It also has an input image modality, which is a game changer. The cheap Sinofrontier models have generally been lacking in this regard.

Basically, Chinese competition is fierce - DeepSeek set the pricing tier, and the question for each lab now is how to justify charging a little more.

MiMo-2.5-Pro has gone with UltraSoeed, pumping out 1000t/s for a 3X price hike.

GLM has gone with 5.2, hitting Opus levels of reasoning at a fraction of the cost.

DeepSeek will probably keep their pricing model and just keep getting better and better.

Qwen-3.7 is the dark horse. Some rumours are Alibaba is simply making these models because they need them internally.

The real question is why this level of innovation and competition isn’t happening in America or Europe. In particular I see no reason Europe doesn’t have a lab competing on these terms.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#236
post #205
post #2

So close! My machine with 192GB RAM + RTX 3090 24GB can almost run this. It says it needs 24GB of VRAM and 256GB of RAM for MoE offloading. https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/glm-5.2#usage-guide In a prior thread, someone said it would take $500k in hardware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48629970

I’m kinda lost here… do y’all really have machines in your houses with hundreds of gigs of RAM?? Am I just behind the times? The page advertises the 8-bit quant as taking ~800GB, which seems like it would require at least 3 consumer motherboards fully stacked w/ 4x64GB cards each. Maybe “locally” has slowly come to imply “…on your homelab”?

As soon as Llama came out I had a realization what was coming and went all-in on hardware with the assumption open source would catch up with GPT4. Surprise, it did, we now have small models that absolutely crush GPT4 in performance.

It wasn’t that absurdly expensive for a hobby, I bought 64GB DDR4 ECC sticks between $70-$100 on eBay before everything took off. Now everyone is in here debating if open source is 1 month or 3 months behind SOTA. The future is obviously local.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#237
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$500k is a vast overestimation. For massive concurrency at FP8 or even BF16 maybe. NVFP4 at reasonable speeds (~120 tok/s) and concurrency is possible at a $80/90k figure with today's prices, maybe even less. That buys you 6 RTX 6000 PRO Blackwells, a decent CPU and motherboard, power supply. 576gb of VRAM. You could do it for under $50k if you're OK with 40 tok/s decode, ~1200 tok/s prefill.

Yes, a single GB300 workstation also does it, probably even more than 120tok/s. Official price 85k...

Actual price $100k and everything is very closed and proprietary. Oddly this MSI system provides "only" 252G vram and 500G ram. I would have expected more vram for this price. Also why 252 instead of 256? https://www.centralcomputer.com/msi-xpertstation-ws300-ai-wo...

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#238
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m kinda lost here… do y’all really have machines in your houses with hundreds of gigs of RAM?? Am I just behind the times? The page advertises the 8-bit quant as taking ~800GB, which seems like it would require at least 3 consumer motherboards fully stacked w/ 4x64GB cards each. Maybe “locally” has slowly come to imply “…on your homelab”?

You don't have to have a server, workstation motherboards support lots of memory channels. I was lucky to buy a lot of RAM before prices skyrocketed. I knew I wanted to play with this stuff, so I spent what felt like a lot of money at the time to buy 8x96GB DDR5-6400 RDIMMs. Now the same RAM costs at least 6x more.

[dead]

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#239
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run one task, while you do another? Or while you sleep / eat / rave?

While my colleagues are running 6 parallel agents at 50-100t/s each, with an actual SOTA model? Don’t you think I‘d get fired after a few weeks of that?

Why would you use this when your company has access to actual SOTA? I don't get it.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#240

I run Q4_K_XL. All it takes to run to get about 6tk/sec is 512gb of ram and 2 3090 GPUs with llama.cpp -cmoe. I also have crappy DDR4, 2400mhz, 3200mhz will bring that speed up to about 9tk/sec. I also have ok 32core epyc CPU, a better 64core would bring it up to about 11tk/sec. I did a budget build before the crazy hardware cost and I regret it everyday. Nevertheless, it's fantastic being able to run this model at h…

Running that full load is at least 600 W, so in a day ~14 kWh. At $0.2 a kWH, that would be $2.80/day or $1k a year of op-ex in electricity. Unless you really want privacy or the fuzzy feeling of owning your own, it’s cheaper, more convenient and has much faster tok/s if you pay a hyper scaler. That said, I do like the direction we are heading and look forward to seeing what host your own hardware we get in 2 years.

No one locally runs full load all day. The only way to see that is if you're training. We are talking about inference. I limit my GPU to 300watts. You can limit them down to 200w. Since everything is not in GPU and the bottleneck is between CPU/system ram. The GPUs don't even get to spike, I see 160w-180w for each GPU during inference. So redo your calculation again. Figure about 6 hrs of daily inference, and we are down to roughly $125 a year. Thanks again for your speculation.
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