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LTL_FTCtoday at 12:35 AM1 replyview on HN

Take a look at AMD’s 12-channel memory servers. The newer Epycs are up to 16-channels now, 1.6TB/s. Pretty great for inference.


Replies

wtallistoday at 4:43 AM

Sure, if you want to make a comparison where the price tags aren't the same order of magnitude, then a recent server is obviously going to be powerful. But since the baseline of this comparison is a laptop and several Thunderbolt SSDs, the kind of servers or workstations with 1.5–2TB of RAM that you can reasonably compare against would have to be the really old ones, barely new enough to support that much total RAM.

And despite the theoretically high memory bandwidth of recent EPYC CPUs, approximately nobody who can afford one is doing LLM inference on them.