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GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

unsloth.ai

281–290 of 328 posts

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one, and I love it. That said my buddies Mac smokes it for inference workloads in terms of tokens per second AND its more usable for other things. If you are training and doing research it's great, if you want to cluster them it cant be beat, but if you just want local inference on a single box buy a mac or even a strix halo device.

can those macs boot linux? i've heard about Asahi but have no idea how far along they are. i've got my fleet configured with nix and sure, nix can target darwin, but there's a _lot_ of sharp edges there: i don't really want to pull that thread unless i have to...

Not the new ones. Only the M1 and M2 have good support for Asahi. But you really don't need it. If you need Linux, use a VM (UTM is free and is equivalent to KVM/QEMU in speed, despite being a Type-2 Hypervisor.)

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#283
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one, and I love it. That said my buddies Mac smokes it for inference workloads in terms of tokens per second AND its more usable for other things. If you are training and doing research it's great, if you want to cluster them it cant be beat, but if you just want local inference on a single box buy a mac or even a strix halo device.

which mac is smoking the spark?

Mine, for one. M5 Max MacBook Pro 128GB with a 4TB SSD. $5100 after a $1000 discount at Microcenter. Great deal if you can find it in stock.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#284
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't need all of the model in VRAM. 1 or 2 RTX Pro 6000s will do. $50K will get you there very nicely, and on a 1600 watt PSU if you go for the MAX-Q versions. (The same wattage PSU I'm typing this on, and have been using over the last 5 years.)

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I live prices are often higher than 20c/kWh, but lets take your example and halve it (10c/kWh) so it's ~$1.40/day or ~$500/year. On Openrouter, the cheapest GLM 5.2 provider costs $3/MTok (at 44 tps). Assuming most use is output tokens, that's still the equivalent of 450k token/day, so we're in the same ball park, but without the capex for 2 3090's and the machine. Self hosted only makes economic sense if your…

That's true, there's a lot of places where power is considerably more expensive than $0.20 USD/kWh. But also the 600W figure assumes that it's fully loaded 24x7x365. Running a system that will be 600W under max CPU usage on all cores and RAM and a few 3090-class GPUs, that same system might be only 90W or around there when idle at 0.00 unix load. If we say: (600 * 24 * 31)/1000 = 446kWh in a month at full load 24 hou…

The usage is irrelevant if we're interested in cost per token. If you use it half as much, you get half as many tokens at half the cost. It's still $5.56 in electricity per million output tokens either way (using $0.20/kWh, adjust accordingly if you have cheaper electricity). If you use the API, you also pay half as much if you use half as much.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#286
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you're buying expensive hardware as insurance for the case that your cloud provider turns against you and you have to switch to another of the twenty offering the same model https://openrouter.ai/z-ai/glm-5.2 or in the worst case buy the same hardware later? How does that make sense?

It’s rationalization for what people want to do anyway. Like buying a new car today and taking on gas, parking, etc, expenses in case the bus route you’re using goes away at some point in the future. It’s not an economic decision, it’s a desire to have the new car dressed up in what-ifs.

Yes, it is understandable that people who are subject to being kicked off the bus at random times through no fault of their own, or who sometimes find that the bus slows to 8 miles per hour and makes them late for work, or who are tired of arguing with the bus driver who refuses to take them to the liquor store, the casino, or the titty bar, may aspire to own a car, even a crappy one.

Any more tortured metaphors in store for us?

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#287
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you talking about Medusa Halo? It's going to support up to 256GB unified memory (up from 128GB for Strix Halo and 192GB for Gorgon Halo). That might just be barely enough to run a 2-bit quant GLM-5.2. It will expand memory bus to 384-bits, vs. 256-bits for Strix Halo which will help with bandwidth (projected to be around 500 GB/sec). But don't expect Madusa Halo-based machines to appear until sometime in 2028. Th…

Strix Halo only supports 96gb of video memory then it goes to 32gb to the host system.

No, I can go upto 112GB on my Strix Halo box running Linux. There are a few boot params to adjust, but it works.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Competing and innovating in the fast moving SOTA end of the llm space requires a ruthless disregard for copyright, IP, bureaucracies, formalities, risk assurances and other slowdowns. It requires a risk tolerant, quick and large flowing investment of capital. It requires a scoped focus that is pragmatic and sharp about key concerns, and efficiently dismissive of meaningless details. Europe can provide none of this. T…

Europe was never at the frontier of any tech? Huh what now?

Not since the salad days of Nokia. Ancient history at this point.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. M…

Competing and innovating in the fast moving SOTA end of the llm space requires a ruthless disregard for copyright, IP, bureaucracies, formalities, risk assurances and other slowdowns. It requires a risk tolerant, quick and large flowing investment of capital. It requires a scoped focus that is pragmatic and sharp about key concerns, and efficiently dismissive of meaningless details. Europe can provide none of this. T…

I’m not completely convinced that America and China are both lawless free for alls, and that that is what’s required for AI innovation.

Re: GLM-5.2 – How to Run Locally

#290

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…

6 tokens per second is not fit for interactive use. I find Gemma 4 (QAT 4-bit, MTP) to be tolerable at about 30 tokens per second on my old GPUs. Anything slower than 15 is annoying. I tried DS4 on my Strix halo (1-bit quantization of DeepSeek V4 Flash, the biggest model that can realistically run on 128GB, right now), and it tops out at something like 10 or 11 with a long time to first response, and that's quite painful to use. I'd definitely rather spend money to use the big models on cloud infrastructure.

And, the several thousand dollars it costs to run these things unusably slowly buys a lot of tokens on the cheap Chinese models.

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