> you get a lot more speed from specialised inference engines with kernels made for your hardware.

Of course you will. But that's not the point. The point is that Llama runs just about every model on just about every hardware. You can always improve on any metric by dropping that constraint. But there are a lot of such metrics:

- ease of use

- range of hardware

- accuracy of results

- range of models

Probably others. Llama.cpp may not be best at any one of those. But across all of them it has been consistently good. They've shown they're willing to stay the course as well. This is a foundation level project much like Linux or Apache.