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 for 30$. I'd expect it to give a decent performance boost but I just haven't had the need for it yet.
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.
I've also linked the quants at the end, but they're not gonna run unless you use the ik_llama-cpp fork I mention, see other posts for more details.
I'm not an ML engineer, so I'm by no means an expert, and the server is busy acting as a Nix cache, but if you have any question, I can try to answer, but best effort.
"-t 8 matches physical cores. The machine has 16 SMT threads but only 8 cores. On a memory-bound workload, oversubscribing threads adds scheduling cost without adding throughput: the cores are waiting on DDR3, not on each other."
But ... isnt that a classic use case for SMT? Giving T1 sth. to do while T0 is waiting on DDR(3) and vise-versa?
I also dont understand the explanation of "--cpu-moe".
If an expert has ~ 4.0 GiB of Parameters, why does optimizing the sequence of experts minimize cash trashing? With 20 MiB of L3 Cash vs 4.0 GiB of Parameters, it wont cash any noticeable amount of the Parameters, will it?
As mentioned by others, only some Intel Xeon E5-2xxx v4 did support DDR3, and according to Intel, the E5-2620 v4 is not one of them.
Would you consider improving the website's layout? Right now I find it below average quality and very distracting. Whether you are an engineer or not is not really important; great engineers can write horrible text or use a layout that is not ideal, for instance.
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 the system is noisy, but that said doing it like this:
llama_print_timings: load time = 83911.65 ms
llama_print_timings: sample time = 26.99 ms / 128 runs ( 0.21 ms per token, 4742.15 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: prompt eval time = 343.41 ms / 7 tokens ( 49.06 ms per token, 20.38 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: eval time = 10639.36 ms / 127 runs ( 83.77 ms per token, 11.94 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: total time = 11114.98 ms / 134 tokens
So 11.94 tokens per second while it's also playing binary cache and CI builder.
When I do it properly, I'll add it to the blog as well!
How many watts is that setup? Cool you got it to work, but maybe only useful for vintage / retro computing rather than practical if the energy consumption makes it economically wasteful.
Glad to see other people realizing this. I've been running Gemma 26B-A4B Q4 on a 2012 Xeon. It's getting around 8 to 12 tokens per second. Obviously it's not comparable to huge contexts and running it on a GPU and the image decoder in llama.cpp is super slow compared to a GPU but for some small automation tasks and general trivia questions it's decent. The speed is just enough to not have to wait for it to finish so you can read along.
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 be able to run locally in 6 years will be very exciting. or frightening.
Also I don’t know what this means for the valuation of the AI companies. I remember asking about this very idea to one of their employees at an event and instead of answering he bailed out to grab a cocktail.
- There is no "moat" (lasting, easy-to-defend technological edge) in AI model businesses. There are just short-term advantages.
- An AI business is a capital-intensive business, just like old factories. Data centers are expensive, models are energy-hungry, and the hardware inside must be replaced every 3–4 years.
- Smaller, specialized models eat margins from below. Transcription, voice, or image detection do not need large models.
There is no reason to expect high margins like you can in traditional software business.
Benefits of AI go mostly to consumers.
What you can run locally in consumer hardware is progressing pretty well.
If you get a not-quite-the-best gaming GPU like a 5080, you can run local models that are better than the state of the art from early 2025. Depending on what you want to do, you might have to switch models. The one size fits all huge models are still a data center thing.
Its a convenience thing. You can run a whole lot of stuff locally from wikipedia to social media/email/video servers whatever. Most people with a full time job and 2 kids dont do it cause who has time and energy to patch and maintain the ever growing complexity of this stuff. These systems will keep growing complex. That also means more bugs. Age old tradeoff between freedom and convenience.
Does this mean my 15 year old Phenom is too old? But it has 16 gb of DDR3 RAM!
Admittedly web browsers and it don't get along that well. Literally the only thing that drags though on my Slackware 15 system, and even then usually only when it gets to around 15 or so open tabs.
I've been running various models on a Mac Pro 2013 (8 cores, 32 GB RAM) at about 8 to 10 t/s for months. It's not fast, but it's more than enough for many actual tasks, in particular background tasks. An iMac pro will do just as well I suppose.
Honestly, at this point you're probably looking at a smaller model, for the Gemma series I'd go with Gemma 4 E4B with drafters, but that's just a hunch from using it on my laptop (where I do have a RTX 4060 M and 96gb ram).
So you'd change the invocation slightly here, but a lot of things you can potentially reuse.
That said, the Gemma 4 E4B models have so far in my experience been... not great when it comes to long context, but they are very passable for basic tasks, and even seem surprisingly okay at tool calls.
Have you tested Qwen3.6 35B? Putting aside the capability claims for that model (which I support, but are not my point here), that 35B has smaller active parameter count than the gemma 4 26B, potentially making both prefill and decode faster out of the box, and has MTP heads built in the model and well supported (you may need to make sure you download a quant that didn't strip them off, as some do to preserve space). I would be curious to see your numbers there too. And if you do test this, please go for a clean one and not a fine-tuned one.
i tried the Q4_K_M model form unsloth with your Q4_K_M drafter, but the required memory to load everything is 72GB. odd. otoh i could load Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled.IQ4_XS.gguf and it requires just ~18 GB:
llama_print_timings: sample time = 45.28 ms / 404 runs ( 0.11 ms per token, 8921.67 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: prompt eval time = 949.42 ms / 51 tokens ( 18.62 ms per token, 53.72 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: eval time = 24067.08 ms / 400 runs ( 60.17 ms per token, 16.62 tokens per second)
llama_print_timings: total time = 242192.55 ms / 451 tokens
so i wonder why the params used by the quantified qwen model use way less memory than the ones of gemma.
Loading will take some minutes, but at 96 you can squeeze the model in and have some headroom around like ~10 GB, although depending on the Xeon, you may have to downgrade to E4B instead. Should still work thou.
The webpage's layout is just horrible. Scrolling is also
non-default - and thus rather annoying; I had to stop after
two scroll events. Why do people think they need so much
fancy effects or non-standard behaviour, if their alleged
goal is to get information across to other people?
That is a very fair point! I just ran a not very scientific benchmark with the system under load, and posted the raw logs in a sibling comment above, but the short answer is that it's hitting 11.94 tokens per second for generation - while it's also being a binary cache and CI build server.
Totally just vibes based, I think it goes up to 20+ tps when it's not under load (and that's me trying to be conservative). For context, reading speed at 250 wpm would be around 5 to 6 tokens per second.
There are ways to trade off compute power for memory bandwidth (like MTP and other speculative decoding approaches). The CPU and GPU would need to be able to share the same cache for this to work. In the Strix Halo case the GPU has a private cache on the GPU die I think, which is the snag.
If you get the inference engine to route the heavy matrix math to the GPU and the speculative drafting to the CPU without choking on latency it's probably gonna be very fast.
Would love to see the benchmarks if someone actually pulls something like that off.
> The argument for speculative decoding is stronger on CPU than on GPU.
Uh. Uuuh.
No?
___
Also
> While a GPU has a massive pool of ultra-fast High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a CPU relies on small, lightning-fast “caches” (L1, L2, L3) built directly onto the processor chip.
What purpose does the quoting of "caches" serve there?
Is this AI writing written by that model running on that host?
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 for 30$. I'd expect it to give a decent performance boost but I just haven't had the need for it yet.
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.
I've also linked the quants at the end, but they're not gonna run unless you use the ik_llama-cpp fork I mention, see other posts for more details.
I'm not an ML engineer, so I'm by no means an expert, and the server is busy acting as a Nix cache, but if you have any question, I can try to answer, but best effort.
"-t 8 matches physical cores. The machine has 16 SMT threads but only 8 cores. On a memory-bound workload, oversubscribing threads adds scheduling cost without adding throughput: the cores are waiting on DDR3, not on each other."
But ... isnt that a classic use case for SMT? Giving T1 sth. to do while T0 is waiting on DDR(3) and vise-versa?
I also dont understand the explanation of "--cpu-moe". If an expert has ~ 4.0 GiB of Parameters, why does optimizing the sequence of experts minimize cash trashing? With 20 MiB of L3 Cash vs 4.0 GiB of Parameters, it wont cash any noticeable amount of the Parameters, will it?
As mentioned by others, only some Intel Xeon E5-2xxx v4 did support DDR3, and according to Intel, the E5-2620 v4 is not one of them.
You sure you got DDR3 .. I have 2 e5 v4 rigs at home and both have ddr4 ... Unless I am wrong and 2011-3 supports ddr3 and ddr4
The first two generations supported DDR3 only. Haswell and Broadwell (v4) brought DDR4 support.
Would you consider improving the website's layout? Right now I find it below average quality and very distracting. Whether you are an engineer or not is not really important; great engineers can write horrible text or use a layout that is not ideal, for instance.
(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 the system is noisy, but that said doing it like this:
llama-cli --model gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-Q8_0.gguf --model-draft gemma-4-26B-A4B-t-assistant-GGUF/wikitext-2-raw_ik-llama-mtp_drafter-conservative/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-assistant-Q8_0.gguf --spec-type mtp --draft-max 3 --draft-p-min 0.0 --color -sm graph -smgs -sas -mea 256 --split-mode-f32 --temp 0.7 --cpu-moe -t 8 --flash-attn on --mla-use 3 --merge-up-gate-experts --special --mlock --run-time-repack --spec-autotune --no-kv-offload --parallel 8 --jinja -p "Why is the sky blue?" -n 128
Gives:
So 11.94 tokens per second while it's also playing binary cache and CI builder.When I do it properly, I'll add it to the blog as well!
I am pretty sure llamacpp have their own benchmarking binary that you can use.
20 tokens per second for eval time is the killer here. It means you can't use this to process any meaningful amount of text.
A GPU typically processes close to 1000 tokens/s during eval.
How many watts is that setup? Cool you got it to work, but maybe only useful for vintage / retro computing rather than practical if the energy consumption makes it economically wasteful.
Glad to see other people realizing this. I've been running Gemma 26B-A4B Q4 on a 2012 Xeon. It's getting around 8 to 12 tokens per second. Obviously it's not comparable to huge contexts and running it on a GPU and the image decoder in llama.cpp is super slow compared to a GPU but for some small automation tasks and general trivia questions it's decent. The speed is just enough to not have to wait for it to finish so you can read along.
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 be able to run locally in 6 years will be very exciting. or frightening.
Also I don’t know what this means for the valuation of the AI companies. I remember asking about this very idea to one of their employees at an event and instead of answering he bailed out to grab a cocktail.
Things you are not supposed to talk about:
- There is no "moat" (lasting, easy-to-defend technological edge) in AI model businesses. There are just short-term advantages.
- An AI business is a capital-intensive business, just like old factories. Data centers are expensive, models are energy-hungry, and the hardware inside must be replaced every 3–4 years.
- Smaller, specialized models eat margins from below. Transcription, voice, or image detection do not need large models.
There is no reason to expect high margins like you can in traditional software business. Benefits of AI go mostly to consumers.
What you can run locally in consumer hardware is progressing pretty well.
If you get a not-quite-the-best gaming GPU like a 5080, you can run local models that are better than the state of the art from early 2025. Depending on what you want to do, you might have to switch models. The one size fits all huge models are still a data center thing.
Training AI models to drive valuation reminds me of high frequency trading
Its a convenience thing. You can run a whole lot of stuff locally from wikipedia to social media/email/video servers whatever. Most people with a full time job and 2 kids dont do it cause who has time and energy to patch and maintain the ever growing complexity of this stuff. These systems will keep growing complex. That also means more bugs. Age old tradeoff between freedom and convenience.
Similar recent posting with optimizations for older Xeon:
High-Performance AI on a Budget: Optimizing llama.cpp for Qwen3.5 Inference on a Dual-GPU HP Z440
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47320244
And this is one of those CPUs which had dual slot motherboards so you can have double the fun (and power bill)
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#s=20028,20029...
The E5 2620-v4 only supports DDR4.
I tried to run gemma 4 on this CPU and it did not go well
https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/ryzen-7-4800u.c2281
It is way too slow
Does this mean my 15 year old Phenom is too old? But it has 16 gb of DDR3 RAM!
Admittedly web browsers and it don't get along that well. Literally the only thing that drags though on my Slackware 15 system, and even then usually only when it gets to around 15 or so open tabs.
This and the previous one are insanely good articles. Thank you!
How about the iMac Pro? Would that work? I was able to put 128gb in it (not as easy as the regular iMac but possible).
I've been running various models on a Mac Pro 2013 (8 cores, 32 GB RAM) at about 8 to 10 t/s for months. It's not fast, but it's more than enough for many actual tasks, in particular background tasks. An iMac pro will do just as well I suppose.
What are the tasks that do well with 8-10 t/s ?
@cafkafk got a recommendation for a good model that fits into 64GB and leaves a couple GB free for other tasks ?
Honestly, at this point you're probably looking at a smaller model, for the Gemma series I'd go with Gemma 4 E4B with drafters, but that's just a hunch from using it on my laptop (where I do have a RTX 4060 M and 96gb ram).
So you'd change the invocation slightly here, but a lot of things you can potentially reuse.
That said, the Gemma 4 E4B models have so far in my experience been... not great when it comes to long context, but they are very passable for basic tasks, and even seem surprisingly okay at tool calls.
Have you tested Qwen3.6 35B? Putting aside the capability claims for that model (which I support, but are not my point here), that 35B has smaller active parameter count than the gemma 4 26B, potentially making both prefill and decode faster out of the box, and has MTP heads built in the model and well supported (you may need to make sure you download a quant that didn't strip them off, as some do to preserve space). I would be curious to see your numbers there too. And if you do test this, please go for a clean one and not a fine-tuned one.
i tried the Q4_K_M model form unsloth with your Q4_K_M drafter, but the required memory to load everything is 72GB. odd. otoh i could load Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled.IQ4_XS.gguf and it requires just ~18 GB:
~/ik_llama.cpp[main]$ build/bin/llama-cli --model ~/models/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Claude-4.7-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled.IQ4_XS.gguf --spec-type mtp --draft-max 3 --draft-p-min 0.0 --spec-autotune -cnv --color --jinja --special -smgs -sas -mea 256 --temp 0.7 -t 6 --parallel 6 --cpu-moe --merge-up-gate-experts --flash-attn on --mla-use 3 --mlock --run-time-repack --no-kv-offload . works pretty fast, at about 15 t/s:
llama_print_timings: sample time = 45.28 ms / 404 runs ( 0.11 ms per token, 8921.67 tokens per second) llama_print_timings: prompt eval time = 949.42 ms / 51 tokens ( 18.62 ms per token, 53.72 tokens per second) llama_print_timings: eval time = 24067.08 ms / 400 runs ( 60.17 ms per token, 16.62 tokens per second) llama_print_timings: total time = 242192.55 ms / 451 tokens
so i wonder why the params used by the quantified qwen model use way less memory than the ones of gemma.
I have an ancient DDR3 Xeon that doesn't support any AVX (dual x5690 and 96GB 1333 MHz RAM). You reckon it would even build / run at all?
CPU (2012)
Mainboard GPU Memory: 32GBThis works.
Loading will take some minutes, but at 96 you can squeeze the model in and have some headroom around like ~10 GB, although depending on the Xeon, you may have to downgrade to E4B instead. Should still work thou.
It may work - depending on your ram speeds it might not even be that much slower.
I run Win 11 Enterprise on an el cheapo spare parts Xeon E3-1275 V2 + 32 GiB DDR3-2133 + Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3H rev. 1.2 (TPM support)
What kind of tokens per second did the op get I saw nothing of this written.
11.94 tokens/sec (from another answer above)
The webpage's layout is just horrible. Scrolling is also non-default - and thus rather annoying; I had to stop after two scroll events. Why do people think they need so much fancy effects or non-standard behaviour, if their alleged goal is to get information across to other people?
I'm now staring at a 10 year old 4U with 256 GB of DDR4 and thinking hmmmmm
I wonder what the tokens per second actually are. Yes, it does say "reading speed" but that varies for everyone, no?
That is a very fair point! I just ran a not very scientific benchmark with the system under load, and posted the raw logs in a sibling comment above, but the short answer is that it's hitting 11.94 tokens per second for generation - while it's also being a binary cache and CI build server.
Totally just vibes based, I think it goes up to 20+ tps when it's not under load (and that's me trying to be conservative). For context, reading speed at 250 wpm would be around 5 to 6 tokens per second.
Huh, that's actually not bad at all! Sure, it's not at the speed of a GPU, but still, 20 tps is cromulent for a CPU.
Makes you wonder if its possible to squeeze more tps out of a strix halo system using the 16 zen5 cores as well as the gpu.
In general you’re mem bandwidth constrained so cpu vs gpu often ends up similar on APUs
There are ways to trade off compute power for memory bandwidth (like MTP and other speculative decoding approaches). The CPU and GPU would need to be able to share the same cache for this to work. In the Strix Halo case the GPU has a private cache on the GPU die I think, which is the snag.
If you get the inference engine to route the heavy matrix math to the GPU and the speculative drafting to the CPU without choking on latency it's probably gonna be very fast.
Would love to see the benchmarks if someone actually pulls something like that off.
Now we need someone try run Kimi K2.6 on old Xeon and DDR3. After all these platforms do support up to 768GB RAM.
I also run a Qwen 3.6 moe A4B on old hardware. I set it up with
numactl --membind=1
so it is constrained to one of the memory sticks which speeds up token generation a little.
> The argument for speculative decoding is stronger on CPU than on GPU.
Uh. Uuuh.
No?
___
Also
> While a GPU has a massive pool of ultra-fast High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a CPU relies on small, lightning-fast “caches” (L1, L2, L3) built directly onto the processor chip.
What purpose does the quoting of "caches" serve there? Is this AI writing written by that model running on that host?
Might consider going for even older CPUs which don't have the Intel ME ring -3 thing which is full of backdoors