You’re basically stating that swapping is also a bad idea. And to take it further, any memory or storage is a bad idea because there’s L1 cache/SRAM which is faster then the rest
The fundamental problem here is that the workload of LLMs is (vastly simplified) a repeated linear read of all the weights, in order. That is, there is no memory locality in time. There is literally anti-locality; When you read a set of weights, you know you will not need them again until you have processed everything else.
This means that many of the old approaches don't work, because time locality is such a core assumption underlying all of them. The best you can do is really a very large pool of very fast ram.
In the long term, compute is probably going to move towards the memory.
The activated experts is only available after routing, at which point you need the weights immediately and will have very poor performance if they are across PCIe
Is that a crazy thing to say? I can't recall the last time I was grateful for swap; it might've been before 2010.
Er, I did exactly this over a decade ago and never looked back. It's literally one of the first things I do on a new machine.
> Might be fine if you’re never using all your RAM
That's definitely happened occasionally, and no, swap almost always just makes it worse. The thrashing makes the entire machine unusable instead of making the allocating app(s) potentially unstable. I've recovered most times by just immediately killing the app I'm using. And in fact I have warnings that sometimes tell me fast enough before I reach the limit to avoid such issues in the first place.
Somewhat indirectly but still.
I've been a bit too busy to turn mine on for a while.
The biggest factor of whether AMD GPUs on Linux are a PITA or not is ROCm. Strix Halo is supported in ROCm 6.x, so it should be supported on most platforms (I haven't tested it tho). ROCm 7.x is supposed to be better but not all apps support it yet.
AMD, if you're reading this, please hire more SWEs. Nvidia will continue to dominate until you beat them at software.
It's pretty weird to insist on a counterargument that has no implications or consequences to the presented argument.
Yes, swapping is a bad idea.
Your second argument also falls flat, because the standard CUDA hardware setup doesn't use CXL so cache coherence isn't available. You're left with manual memory synchronization. Pretending that GPUs have cache for system RAM when they don't is pretty suspect.