AMD Strix Halo RDMA Cluster Setup Guide | Hacker News Reader

AMD Strix Halo RDMA Cluster Setup Guide

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232 pointsjakogut87 comments

I have two 128gb Strix Halos and have been extremely excited about Antirez's (Redis author) work on DS4, especially with 4bit quant using two machines: https://github.com/antirez/ds4

Right now the speed isn't good for GLM 5.2, Deepseek V4 Flash speed is okay for me (actually reading the output) and quite usable. See kyuz0's great recent video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkKXm_mKCCM

With a bit more speed and model improvements, local AI becomes a reasonable practical thing! The biggest problem is all the tech companies making consumer hardware completely unaffordable, and I don't think this is accidental. Look at Micron's profits and share price lately...

I got my Strix machines for ~2k eur each, best computers this 90s kid has ever owned, but those days are gone :(

What's the advantage of ds4 over llama.cpp, esp if down the line they upstream his forked kernels?

IIRC llama.cpp doesn't implement DSv4's compressed attention mechanism, and while it does use (credited) parts of llama.cpp, it's focused on this great model for now. Much of this is covered better in the repo's readme.

In repo Readme and antirez reddit comments there was also expressed willingness to upstream.

I think mainly that he can move much faster with specific improvements targeting Deepseek on Systems with unified memory (Mac or Strix). It's a lot easier to optimize if you don't need to worry about all the other architectures. So optimize he did and it's just a lot faster than llama cpp for deepseek v4 pro and flash. Also interesting features are more doable, like SSD streaming, which makes it possible to load MOE weights for a model larger than your VRAM, I don't see that landing in llama cpp anytime soon.

Currently, llama.cpp clusters don't support tensor parallelism, have a look at Donato Capitella's detailed report: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PkKXm_mKCCM He also provides rocm toolboxes for Strix Halo: https://strix-halo-toolboxes.com/#about

>The biggest problem is all the tech companies making consumer hardware completely unaffordable, and I don't think this is accidental. Look at Micron's profits and share price lately...

You realize "tech companies" isn't a monolith? Micron charging inflated prices doesn't magically benefit OpenAI. The "high prices keep out competitors" theory doesn't make much sense either. It's like saying Dennys benefits from higher egg prices because it makes cooking eggs at home more expensive.

You got it wrong. Use appliances instead of eggs. If getting an oven gets more expensive I rather keep going to Dennys.

It’s classic capex vs opex. I’d keep paying my openai subscription instead of dropping $3k to run a subpar model. If the thing costs $1k I would consider it.

The big AI companies already have all of the cheap hardware to run on. It's more like if Denny's bought up all of the eggs when prices were normal, held onto them, then kept buying to keep egg prices up.

>The big AI companies already have all of the cheap hardware to run on.

Have they? Aren't they doing a massive datacenter build-out right now? Moreover the massive profits for Micron and Nvidia must be coming from somewhere, and I doubt it's price-sensitive consumers.

openai etc are going to have a higher utilisation of the hardware so can afford it more than small companies/people. Efficient resource use matters more when they're expensive.

Dennys can benefit from higher egg prices if they can lock in long term contracts with suppliers for lower egg prices when smaller companies selling directly to consumers can't.

I think that realistically, companies compete against each other as individuals and compete against smaller companies and individuals acting more like cartels/monopolies, and that's what OP is referring to in terms of hardware purchasing/contacts/pricing. This also extends outside of tech to investing, so it's likely not just tech responsible for this.

Last year you could buy a AI Max 395+ with 128G for 2.5k, now it's almost $4k.

Or maybe you're right, I originally remembered 2k as well. I wanted to wait for the AI Max 395+ upgrade of my laptop, and now it makes no sense to upgrade.

I think people buying laptops for AI use are, sorry, just plain crazy. You overpay for the screen and keyboard and battery and whatever, plus you get much worse thermal performance because of basic physics (area vs volume). My Framework Desktop has a Noctua cooler which works really well.

[Tangent: all my life I've been downvoted into a smoking hole in the ground, particularly on reddit r/hardware, for questioning the wisdom of laptops for high performance computing, including gaming. Everyone insists they need the mobility, and then just leave it plugged in the whole time, absolutely refusing to admit it's about aesthetic preference.]

I’m mostly with you but there are some people who like to use one machine for both laptop and AI work, and it’s much cheaper than buying two separate devices.

For me the smaller footprint, lower power consumption and portability (admittedly between desks only) are the three advantages of using a laptop over a desktop for these purposes.

The Strix Halo mini PCs use the exact same chip, and have a much smaller footprint than any laptop. Have you seen the size of these machines? I can and have easily popped my daily driver computer into my very small backpack to attend a demoparty for example.

With the laptop you probably won't get silent operation at the peak 100-140w, i.e. you've now massively overpaid for lower performance.

Can you get these from vendors like Asus and lenovo these days?

The ones I've seen on aliexpress are from unknown Chinese vendors.

I have a Framework Desktop as primary PC (great cooling, beautiful case with handle) and the Bosgame M5 dedicated for AI use.

I was also a bit wary about Bosgame but TBH they've been great and the machine is rock solid, if a little noisier than and not as pretty as the FD. You can just buy from them directly and be fine, best computer deal out there by a mile.

I've had an ASUS PN-50E minipc, and its bios is broken and ASUS won't fix it, it cannot wake from sleep on Windown 11 25H2. Support told me to reinstall windows... and never got past level 1 support.

I've also got a Beelink minipc, which also had some issues, and the unknown Chineese vendor did respond meaningfully to support email, and created a BIOS update in ~2 weeks after a driver update surfaced a firmware bug.

I'd recommend skipping ASUS. Lenovo may be fine.

out of edit time: so my main point: Beelink may be new to the business and relatively unknown, but my overall experience is very positive with them so far. Fr better than with some Big Brands.

I generally agree for everything except Macbook Pros which outperform most available desktop setups for AI tasks - but they are also now out of reach for most people after the price hikes (6.7k now for 128gb, i got mine for 4.7k just about a year ago).

Honestly I think this is just a bad time to be buying hardware - everything is marked up an insane amount that doesn't really make sense.

Maybe there is a reason?

It's like you are advocating for a public transport instead of a personal car but when questioned how to get to a place which is not erviced by a public network your solution is to rent a bus.

> Last year you could buy a AI Max 395+ with 128G for 2.5k, now it's almost $4

Only if you pay the Framework premium.

https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-m5-ai-mini-deskto...

I don't have access to the USD price, but it's 2500€ (tax included), up from 1600€ in November when I ordered mine.

that does not have thunderbolt / usb 5 though

Also probably an unknown china firmware instead of a supported one?

(Also no nazi bar)

nazi bar?

https://community.frame.work/t/framework-supporting-far-righ...

lmao no.

The cheapest ones with 128GB were 1580€/$1840 as late as mid December.

I was hoping to buy a competent local model machine later this year but given the prices I’m shelving that for now. Especially because the frontier models are very cheap relative to the cost of building my own setup. Especially because AI specialised hardware and processors are improving very fast, meaning hardware we buy now will become obsolete for this use case much faster than for traditional computer use cases.

In 1-3 years the hardware crunch will be over, local distilled models will provide Opus 4.8 like intelligence, and the hardware will exist to provide usable performance.

I had a Strix Halo laptop with 128GB which unfortunately died last week. I paid 2800 euro for it. If I buy the same machine today, the sticker price is 7899.

The device was not perfect by any means, but the ability to run fairly large models is some kind of magic.

>sticker price is 7899.

It's not even worth it at that point.

You can get a used enterprise grade SXM baseboard with 4-8 V100/A100 GPUs off eBay at a similar price. That will even get you actual HMB ram and NVlink. Along with 10x the AI performance, assuming you don't care about your electricity bill of course.

ignoring the fact one would need a bit of a different setup (chassis, PSU) to run it, I casually looked and there's nothing below $25-50k euros for such a board decked out, depending on the config. TBH even that doesn't sound bad, but I wouldn't even know where to start how to run it.

This is from the USA site:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/157742745616

It's always a gamble buying used electric but per the description, fully decked out server with 256gb vram.

Though at 2U it is going to sound like a 747 taking off from your office.

So that’s where all the used V100s are going. I’ve been thinking about making a water cooled version of those because I don’t have a rack to put these servers on.

That's surprisingly inexpensive for 256 GiB of VRAM, but how much power would it take to run it? Is it even feasible with residential circuits?

Can you link because 8k is the price of two A100s so that would be a steal.

4x A100s with the baseboard for $9k (USD).

https://www.ebay.com/itm/336632412718

Buy one and let me use it when you're sleeping.

how do you even connect these? i assuming expensively

The connection does not look standard so probably need to find some kind of OEM interposer card, which would allow you to connect some slimSAS cables that in turn connect to pcie adapter cards.

You'd need at least threadripper cpu/motherboard to handle that many pcie slots/lanes.

Not to mention that a baseboard like that is not going to work with a standard ATX power supply, so you'd have to provide your own power solution.

If that doesn't sound fun to you, you're probably better off buying Claude tokens.

first off rude, secondly, the issue is the existence of a mcio to whatever mess that thing is. i assume it is sxm5 or something and you probably need a pci-e 6/5 switch in the middle

You can get a new M5 Max MacBook pro with 128 GB unified ram (targeted by Antirez for DwarfStar4) even after the Apple price increases, it's less than 7899 by at least $1000. And you probably won't pull more than 100 Watts.

I have one of these. Got it a few weeks before the price increases. On the 14" version charging is limited to 96 watts, but the chip can pull north of that with adequate cooling, so the battery will literally drain while plugged in.

It isn't a problem for me, more amusing than anything else (I run in Low Power mode 90% of the time) but worth knowing for anyone thats thinking about pushing the hardware to its limit 24/7.

You are comparing US pricing with EU pricing. EU pricing includes 21% VAT and currency conversion "rounding up".

The cheapest 128GB Macbook Pro here costs €7.949,00.

No doubt a better value than the HP, and will depreciate a lot less quickly, but just as expensive. Unfortunately, not being able to run Linux is a breaking point for me.

> And you probably won't pull more than 100 Watts

I've played with ds4 on such a machine, and the battery drains when using only a 96W power brick. But you can put it in low power mode and the fans won't even turn on while it delivers something like a third of the performance.

Yeah it isn't worth it, but comparing a server with a laptop is also not a relevant comparison.

I didn't get a Strix Halo laptop because it was the best bang per buck, I got it because it was an awesome machine that could do a little bit of everything, fit in a backpack and only needed 140W.

But noone should buy one at 7899, obviously. It was a tough sell for me at the old 2800 pricing.

everything strix halo went 2-3x bananas, same ballpark figures as apple hardware now and lead times on all of those are in months. Ridiculous where we ended up at.

The Bosgame M5 128GB went up 52% in price ($1840 -> $2799), so not 2-3x. And they are in stock. Still, a very big price increase.

For that price surely you get the rtx pro with like 96GB and vastly superior compute?

Yes but it depends what you want. I didn't want to spend 8k (or now 11k) for a video card that I couldn't run without turning my home office into a boiler room and pay through the nose in electricity.

I wanted a laptop that could run some medium sized LLMs locally and experiment with. Strix Halo is great for that. But it was also 2800 euros for a 128GB premium laptop. Not 7899 like it is now.

Shame it broke out of warranty.

if strix was 2k now i would insta buy 1

Check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48705076

The top model is a little over 2k, though.

Are they fairly reasonable performance from your experience?

I'm about to move house and one of the things I want is better local AI. Ideally running a variety of smaller models at the same time, but occasionally one larger one. 128GB unified is pretty appealing, but for the price I can also get a handful of 5060 ti 16GB which give vastly better compute/inference speed.

Seen a few reviews of the strix halo boards from people complaining the tps is too low so definitely keen to hear others' experiences with em.

This is amazing!

I'm working on a three node strix halo agentic OS factory designed to be maintained by local agents: https://github.com/projectbluefin/testing-lab

This memory bandwidth combo is amazing for homelabbers. kyuz0's work on these containers has made the investment in this kit so valuable I hope Framework is sending you hardware!

https://projectbluefin.io/server/ is what I'm hoping to ship, designed to just ship setups like this ootb and things like this would be so much harder without kyuz0!

(Note: The 64GB ones are going for $1700-ish empty, the prices on the 128's are outrageous we can just keep making the labs more deterministic over time!)

Yep, nice write up, seems we are all doing this. Its as close as you can get to Provider level for essentially prosumer hardware. I'll share what I've got with this running under k0s and the npu work.

So this is kind of fascinating. The main hardware costs here seem to be:

- 2x Framework Desktop AI Mainboards with 128GB of RAM for $3150 each

- 2x 100G Ethernet controllers for ~$500 each

So the Framework board has a single PCI-e 4.0 x4 slot, which amounts to 8GB/s or 64Gbps theoretical so you're not getting 100G. Also, the 100G cards all seem to be PCI-e x16 slots for obvious reasons so you need a riser or an adapter or something to even get them to work.

I don't know how hot a 100GbE copper NIC runs but, from experience, 10GbE NICs have been basically giant heatsinks, basically. So fiber might be advisable and I expect short fiber cables here probably aren't cost-prohibitive given everything else.

As an aside, if you are using Ethernet for clustering and you're clustering 2 devices, in an ideal world you'd be using simplex Ethernet but that's not an option here.

I wonder if the author considered USB 4.0 for clustering? I ask because I know people who have clustered Mac Studios over TB5 and that bandwidth is up to 120Gbps. The version of USB4 on the Ryzen AI 395 seems to be 40Gbps, which isn't that far off 8GB/s over PCI-e 4.0 x4.

But the limiting factor with Strix Halo (and DGX Spark for that matter) is memory bandwidth, both under 300GB/s. The obvious comparison is to the Mac Studio. Unfortunately the largest spec they currently sell is 96GB. It had been as high as 512GB. And 96GB is $6700+ but you're also getting way better performance AFAICT eg [1]. The M3 Ultra has ~900GB/s memory bandwidth.

You can alternatively buy a Macbook Pro with M5 Max and 128GB of RAM (now $8000, was $5500-6000 a few days ago) but that tops out at ~600GB/s, which is still double these mini AI boxes.

Oh and if you don't want to go the way of these Framework motherboards, you can buy a whole 128GB Strix Halo PC for $3k or less.

I think the main point here though is we're only a few years away from running 300B+ (or even 1T+) param models at useful speeds on enthusiast hardware.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1u5mfaq/you_can...

No reason to use fiber on short runs like that. DAC cables are cheap and better in pretty much every way over short distances. You're probably thinking of RJ-45 NICs and SFP modules which are known to run pretty hot.

+1 fiber over short distance just adds power/heat and latency compared to DAC - fiber is nice for ease of cabling and airflow, but not performance or cost when below a few meters.

He did cover the Tb/USB4 ;)

Indeed, here: https://github.com/kyuz0/amd-strix-halo-vllm-toolboxes/blob/...

Looks like there is currently no RDMA support for thunderbolt, so it's a much higher latency connection. Apple has RDMA over thunderbolt working, so I wonder if it's possible on Strix Halo.

I ran Ms-01s with 100GBE, copper DACs in my kubernetes cluster. Killed the NVME drives in that tiny box. I'd bet the same issue doing this with FW. And I wasn't even pushing 100GBE very hard at all, it was mostly for fun.

AI + 100GBE (under load) + tiny box = unreliable and eead very quickly.

How many MS-01s did you have clustered?

And could you not use something like an N5 + iSCSI for storage?

What is simplex ethernet?

Imagine two computers A and B. A has two NICs, A1 and A2. B has B1 and B2. So 4 NICs total. You connect directly A1 to B1 and A2 to B2 with crossover cables. You then route all the traffic from A to B over A1 to B1 and all the traffic from B to A over B2 to A2.

Why do you do all this? To avoid collisions and the loss of effective bandwidth from back-offs.

It only really works with 2 computers because if you add a 3rd, now you need 12 NICs instead of 4 for unidirectional point-to-point connections.

But why would you? You don't have collisions since the introduction of full duplex ethernet on both copper/fiber. Kinda sounds like you're confusing half duplex with simplex, or maybe bidi? As a network engineer I've never seen someone ever refer to "simplex ethernet".

That's not how modern ethernet works at all. A single NIC talking directly to an another one has no collisions ever. Depending on what your channel is, either you have separate wires for the directions, or you are using a hybrid circuit (as in telegraphs, the term is so overloaded it's hard to google). Either way, packets going in one direction never wait for packets going in the other.

The 512GB Mac Studio is going for around 30K used.

This is amazing work - RDMA on these smaller unified memory boxes (somewhat) bridges the gap for consumers from the ~24GB 3090/4090/7900 card that are around to 128GB/256GB! Still not cheap, especially now, but... obtainable?

I do hope that apple opens up RDMA for their TB4 machines... ds4 using TB5 macs works great - but there are a lot of capable tb4 (M2/1) machines out there and afaik there's no hardware limitation preventing RDMA from working (at lower bandwidth, but with the latency gains!) on the older stuff.

Benchmarks are here: https://kyuz0.github.io/amd-strix-halo-vllm-toolboxes/

Would love to see DeepSeek V4 flash/pro and MiniMax M3 benchmarks but already these are pretty impressive, first strix Halo setup I've seen with some serious performance.

EDIT: Apologies - I think I misunderstood these benchmarks - it seems this is actually very slow when compared to a M4 or M5 chip with a good amount of memory. Looking at the creators video here: https://youtu.be/Cfl3TS7ME5s?t=734 -- it seems the performance of strix halo is much much slower than I get on my M4 MBP - which gets ~400 prefill and ~20 tok/s generation

The pp speeds are really slow (50), I think there‘s room for improvement still.

Ah yea after watching one of the creators youtube videos I realize these benchmarks are combining prefill and decode which isn't super helpful - it seems this struggles with the exact same bottlenecks as all strix halo setups, memory bandwidth. It seems this is still significantly slower than equivalent memory sizing on Mac hardware.

How are the memory bandwidths specs of Macbooks vs this?

The apple silicon chips basically beat everything in bandwidth. Highest amount of memory controllers (i.e. channels) for a given capacity. That's the main party trick.

I looked it up: 512 GB/s for the two node AMD cluster, Macbook Pro with M5 CPU has 153 GB/s. But you can get faster Macs with M5 Pro or M5 Max.

Strix halo I believe is 256GB/s max memory bandwidth and M5 Max is 614GB/s - M3 Ultra is up to 800gb/s

They are heavily bogged down by bandwidth unfortunately. The macs are on another level. If Apple decides to release AI dedicated hardware, it would dominate this space (consumer AI).

This is exactly the type of technical depth that makes a difference. I've been following all the work you have been doing.

The 2 Intel E810 100Gb NICs together cost about $800 and they won't fit in a mini PC that the AI Max often comes as. Docks or custom racks like the photo would be required. Great project though.

As a sibling comment says, the author has a video of testing GLM 5.2 q2 on the pair of machines at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkKXm_mKCCM . He also has a video about getting Deepseek 4 Flash on 1 or 2 AI Max machines using antirez's ds4 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfl3TS7ME5s .

Edit: I actually have a website tracking the price of the AI Max 395+ mini pcs (on amazon, anyway). They can be had for about $3300 in the US and about 3400 euro in Germany. ( https://gpuquicklist.com/apus?models=AI%20Max+%20395%20128GB and germany: https://gpuquicklist.com/apus_de?models=AI%20Max+%20395%2012... )

What‘s the advantage of using ConnectX-5 Ex VPI NICs instead of much cheaper ConnectX-3 VPI NICs to connect two machines directly, other than PCIe 4.0 instead of PCIe 3.0? Can they offload more tasks when doing RDMA? Solid information is hard to come by.

The machine only has pcie4x4 so 50Gb bandwidth, pcie3 would halve that to 25Gb

Thats the problem with these AMD laptop class cores, they have very little IO. They have been saying they will release in a desktop form factor, but then it probably wont have such good memory bandwidth...

The Nvidia boxes have 200Gb ethernet thats much more useful for clustering.

Yes CX5 can offload more. I believe CX4 has similar offloading capabilities as CX3, except that it supports 100G.

Another note: In my experience, RoCE works much better on CX4+ generation. CX3 is best with Infiniband. I think some firmwares on the CX3 generation, has a messed up config for RoCE. But running Infiniband is not a complex task, is way easier than people think, like 10x easier and faster to setup than Ethernet.

Thanks. Yes, I'm using Infiniband with CX3. Not seeing real speedups so far. I was wondering if upgrading to CX5 could help.

Hmm, coing PCIe -> NIC -> NIC -> PCIe seems a bit silly, couldn't both devices communicate directly over PCIe?

You need Non-Transparent Bridging (NTB) for that; I don't know if AMD has it.

Ideally Linux would add support for RDMA via Thunderbolt.

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