Hands-On with the AMD Ryzen AI Halo
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I used llama swap for a while before leaning into lemonade. The UI has improved a lot, but be careful as the most of the models default to very small 4K context windows by default.
They’re doing some nice things with their Halo models, which load an ensemble of different types of model at the same time. With high vram it’s easy to keep them all in memory, so even though the compute is limited the context switching is fast.
You do lag a bit on the upstream engine releases, the llama.cpp/sd.cpp/whisper libraries are downloaded from inside the app.
vLLM is in experimental mode, I haven’t tested it. It’s limited in the models they suggest, but you can download anything from huggingface with a two click install.
Is there some means to monitor the queries it's sending (or hold and review before transmission) or throttle to avoid triggering abuse thresholds on any single domain?
I think it stores basic logs but if you wanted to monitor you’re probably going to want to proxy it with an LLM gateway.
My Spark can do Qwen3.6 MoE A3B at 60 to 70-ish token/second and that's really good, but there's limits the usefulness of that model. It's not useful for coding, in any case.
Once people can run something like GLM 5.2 at lower quants (512GB could do a passable job), then I think the story changes.
Whether we ever see DRAM as cheap as it was ever again, I don't know.
That doesn't mean that local models are useless though! If Mythos/Sol is an ASI that threatens to take your job and turn you into paperclips, then Qwen/Gemma is an old-fashioned office secretary that loyally helps you with tasks but doesn't have a good grasp of details. Every white-collar worker 50 years ago would have killed to have a hard-working personal secretary.
That memory bandwidth is painful. It's like trying to fill an Olympic swimming pool with a thimble.
It is excellent as a regular PC, though.
Yeah it is slower than real RAM by a good amount for latency, but you can get similar bandwidth and the cost was history about half of the same size DDR.
Not anymore cost effective, I guess, but gets you the ability to work over very large model sizes maybe. But the problem is that tensor matmul etc hardware wouldn't work effectively with it.
Useful for KVCache though.
It’s kind of like general aviation where you can go buy a Cessna but it’s only going to realistically get you somewhere you could drive anyways but do you really wanna spend that mush cash to get road trip distance at slightly better than road trip speeds? You really need a 5 million dollar jet and that’s just not practical. That’s sort of how I feel about this device.
It definitely seems to be the leader on 'general intelligence' on this hardware from my casual usage, but the newer Qwen or Gemma series models are much more usable speed-wise for agentic use, and often is as good or better than DS4 on that front.
Yeah, It's be great to have 256GB RAM, but that's really expensive now anyway and there's no way I could get my wife to sign off on spending 5 grand (or more now) on a box with that much memory.
It was a good deal for $2K. For $4K? I'm not so sure. Of course, most of the cost is RAM, so what can we do?
just a perspective(you can re check results in youtube reviews): ryzen ai runs most moe models under 60t/s while nvidia gpu can runt them at 100t/s. and you preferably need deep models for code, they would run at 40t/s.
No, the hope really is these other platforms with a shared memory architecture. The DGX Spark won't be it because of the aforementioned market segmentation. So that leaves two players: AMD and Apple.
The AMD platform is still too low memory bandwidth, currently <300GB/s. For comparison a 5090 (or 6000 Pro) is 1.8TB/s and the M3 Ultra Mac Studio is ~900GB/s. Oh and B100/B200 uses HBM3e memory at ~3.2TB/s. The M5 Max in some Macbook Pros tops out at ~600GB/s. So you need access to better RAM and better CPU architecture for all this.
My great white hope is Apple. They have the market power to get memory and build silicon that coul dhave enough FLOPS to compete with NVidia's platform. They've started talking about it and I've seen rumors they're targeting the M7 generation (2028) for a huge leap. I'll believe it when I see it however.
But the point is, I think we'll be running 31B models at 100+tok/s on enthusiast hardware in 2 years and we'll likely be able to locally run 100-400B models, possibly larger.