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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Did the napkin math on M3 Ultra ROI when DeepSeek V3 launched: at $0.70/2M tokens and 30 tps, a $10K M3 Ultra would take ~30 years of non-stop inference to break even - without even factoring in electricity. Clearly people aren't self-hosting to save money.

I've got a lite GLM sub $72/yr which would require 138 years to burn through the $10K M3 Ultra sticker price. Even GLM's highest cost Max tier (20x lite) at $720/yr would buy you ~14 years.

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Everyone should do the calculation for themselves. I too pay for couple of subs. But I'm noticing having an agent work for me 24/7 changes the calculation somewhat. Often not taken into account: the price of input tokens. To produce 1K of code for me, the agent may need to churn through 1M of tokens of codebase. IDK if that will be cached by the API provider or not, but that makes x5-7 times price difference. OK discussion today about that and more https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2020626466522685499

And it's worth noting that you can get DeepSeek at those prices from DeepSeek (Chinese), DeepInfra (US with Bulgarian founder), NovitaAI (US), AtlasCloud (US with Chinese founder), ParaSail (US), etc. There is no shortage of companies offering inference, with varying levels of trustworthiness, certificates and promises around (lack of) data retention. You just have to pick one you trust

I don't think an Apple PC can run full Deepseek or GLM models.

Even if you quantize the hell out of the models to fit in the memory, they will be very slow.

Doing inference with a Mac Mini to save money is more or less holding it wrong. Of course if you buy some overpriced Apple hardware it’s going to take years to break even.

Buy a couple real GPUs and do tensor parallelism and concurrent batch requests with vllm and it becomes extremely cost competitive to run your own hardware.

> Doing inference with a Mac Mini to save money is more or less holding it wrong.

No one's running these large models on a Mac Mini.

> Of course if you buy some overpriced Apple hardware it’s going to take years to break even.

Great, where can I find cheaper hardware that can run GLM 5's 745B or Kimi K2.5 1T models? Currently it requires 2x M3 Ultras (1TB VRAM) to run Kimi K2.5 at 24 tok/s [1] What are the better value alternatives?

[1] https://x.com/alexocheema/status/2016404573917683754

Six months ago I'd have said EPYC Turin. You could do a heck of a build with 12Ch DDR5-6400 and a GPU or two for the dense model parts. 20k would have been a huge budget for a homelab CPU/GPU inference rig at the time. Now 20k won't buy you the memory.

Not VRAM? What performance are people getting running GLM or Kimi on DDR5?

It's important to have enough VRAM to get the kv cache and shared trunk of the model on GPU, but beyond that it's really hard to make a dent in the pool of 100s of gigabytes of experts.

I wish I had better numbers to compare with the 2x M3 Ultra setup. My system is a few RTX A4000s on a Xeon with 190GB/s actual read bandwidth, and I get ~8 tok/s with experts quantized to INT4 (for large models with around 30B active parameters like Kimi K2.) Moving to 1x RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell and tripling my read bandwidth with EPYC Turin might make it competitive with the the macs, but I dunno!

There's also some interesting tech with ktransformers + sglang where the most frequently-used experts are loaded on GPU. Pretty neat stuff and it's all moving fast.

There's a reddit comment here https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1r4m4it/comment... that says:

my system is running GLM-5 MXFP4 at about 17 tok/s. That’s with a single RTX Pro 6000 on an EPYC 9455P with 12 channels of DDR5-6400. Only 16k context though, since it’s too slow to use for programming anyway and that’s the only application where I need big context.

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