ggerganov

Didn't expect this to pop up here - please ignore for now. We are preparing official semantic versioning of llama.cpp and it's almost ready, but not quite.

More info about the versioning process is here: https://github.com/ggml-org/ggml/discussions/1579

Here are the prefill speeds:

    Device 0: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, compute capability 12.0, VMM: yes, VRAM: 32109 MiB
  | model                          |       size |     params | backend  |  fa |            test |                  t/s |
  | ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | -------- | --: | --------------: | -------------------: |
  | qwen35 27B Q4_K - Medium       |  15.92 GiB |    27.32 B | CUDA     |   1 |   pp2048 @ d512 |      3714.02 ± 10.85 |
  | qwen35 27B Q4_K - Medium       |  15.92 GiB |    27.32 B | CUDA     |   1 |  pp2048 @ d1024 |      3684.86 ± 15.21 |
  | qwen35 27B Q4_K - Medium       |  15.92 GiB |    27.32 B | CUDA     |   1 |  pp2048 @ d2048 |       3650.80 ± 8.53 |
  | qwen35 27B Q4_K - Medium       |  15.92 GiB |    27.32 B | CUDA     |   1 |  pp2048 @ d8192 |       3473.88 ± 0.97 |
  | qwen35 27B Q4_K - Medium       |  15.92 GiB |    27.32 B | CUDA     |   1 | pp2048 @ d32768 |       2754.69 ± 4.07 |

  ggml_metal_device_init: GPU name:   MTL0 (Apple M2 Ultra)
  | model                          |       size |     params | backend  | fa |            test |                  t/s |
  | ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | -------- | -: | --------------: | -------------------: |
  | qwen35 27B Q8_0                |  26.62 GiB |    26.90 B | MTL      |  1 |   pp2048 @ d512 |        379.75 ± 0.21 |
  | qwen35 27B Q8_0                |  26.62 GiB |    26.90 B | MTL      |  1 |  pp2048 @ d1024 |        377.15 ± 0.35 |
  | qwen35 27B Q8_0                |  26.62 GiB |    26.90 B | MTL      |  1 |  pp2048 @ d2048 |        371.46 ± 0.91 |
  | qwen35 27B Q8_0                |  26.62 GiB |    26.90 B | MTL      |  1 |  pp2048 @ d8192 |        344.84 ± 0.41 |
  | qwen35 27B Q8_0                |  26.62 GiB |    26.90 B | MTL      |  1 | pp2048 @ d32768 |        222.42 ± 5.29 |

Btw, based on your numbers, I think our use cases are quite different. I use the agent for very targeted sessions - basically things that are clear to me how to do, just want to automate them. My workflow is usually: new session -> read this, this and this -> do that. I.e. I don't let it wander at all in the codebase, so I rarely exceed the context window.

Also, I get a lot of mileage from the ngram-based speculative decoding functionality [0] as it allows me to iterate on the implementation much faster.

[0] https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/19164

As a baseline, I run all models in Q8 [0] because I want to be confident that when I observe a problem, the root cause is not due to the quantization. However, in this specific case, I use Q8 on the mac and Q4 on the RTX machine because the latter does not fit the full context at Q8. So far, I don't have conclusive evidence that the Q4 quantization affects the quality in a significant way for this model and the tasks that I am using it for.

[0] https://huggingface.co/ggerganov/presets/blob/main/preset.in...

I haven't spent a dime on cloud inference, so cannot make a direct comparison like you. But I can 100% attest to the fact that Qwen3.6-27B is a very capable local model for coding tasks. Over the last month and a half I've been using it almost daily, either on my M2 Ultra or on my RTX 5090 box. I use it for small mundane tasks at ggml-org [0] - nothing really impressive, but definitely a helpful tool for a maintainer. I think I would be using it much more, if I didn't have to spend a lot of my time on reviewing PRs. Currently, I have a very lightweight harness - the pi agent with everything stripped (`pi -nc --offline`) and a short system prompt [1] to align it a bit with my style. About the generation speed: ~100-150 t/s on the RTX 5090 and ~40 t/s on the Mac. I definitely prefer running it on the RTX machine - it's so much faster. But for the sake of testing and getting wider experience with local configurations, I often run it on the Mac too.

[0] - https://github.com/search?q=%22Assisted-by%22+user%3Aggml-or...

[1] - https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/blob/master/.pi/gg/SYS...

llama-batched-bench -hf ggml-org/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF -npp 512,1024,2048,4096,8192,16384,32768 -ntg 128 -npl 1 -c 36000

M2 Ultra, Q8_0

  |    PP |     TG |    B |   N_KV |   T_PP s | S_PP t/s |   T_TG s | S_TG t/s |      T s |    S t/s |
  |-------|--------|------|--------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
  |   512 |    128 |    1 |    640 |    1.307 |   391.69 |    6.209 |    20.61 |    7.516 |    85.15 |
  |  1024 |    128 |    1 |   1152 |    2.534 |   404.16 |    6.227 |    20.56 |    8.760 |   131.50 |
  |  2048 |    128 |    1 |   2176 |    5.029 |   407.26 |    6.229 |    20.55 |   11.258 |   193.29 |
  |  4096 |    128 |    1 |   4224 |   10.176 |   402.52 |    6.278 |    20.39 |   16.454 |   256.72 |
  |  8192 |    128 |    1 |   8320 |   20.784 |   394.14 |    6.376 |    20.08 |   27.160 |   306.33 |
  | 16384 |    128 |    1 |  16512 |   43.513 |   376.53 |    6.532 |    19.59 |   50.046 |   329.94 |
  | 32768 |    128 |    1 |  32896 |   99.137 |   330.53 |    7.081 |    18.08 |  106.218 |   309.70 |

DGX Spark, Q8_0

  |    PP |     TG |    B |   N_KV |   T_PP s | S_PP t/s |   T_TG s | S_TG t/s |      T s |    S t/s |
  |-------|--------|------|--------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
  |   512 |    128 |    1 |    640 |    0.881 |   580.98 |   16.122 |     7.94 |   17.003 |    37.64 |
  |  1024 |    128 |    1 |   1152 |    1.749 |   585.43 |   16.131 |     7.93 |   17.880 |    64.43 |
  |  2048 |    128 |    1 |   2176 |    3.486 |   587.54 |   16.169 |     7.92 |   19.655 |   110.71 |
  |  4096 |    128 |    1 |   4224 |    7.018 |   583.64 |   16.245 |     7.88 |   23.263 |   181.58 |
  |  8192 |    128 |    1 |   8320 |   14.189 |   577.33 |   16.427 |     7.79 |   30.617 |   271.75 |
  | 16384 |    128 |    1 |  16512 |   29.015 |   564.68 |   16.749 |     7.64 |   45.763 |   360.81 |
  | 32768 |    128 |    1 |  32896 |   60.413 |   542.40 |   17.359 |     7.37 |   77.772 |   422.98 |

Better keep the KV cache in full precision

Yes, I provided detailed numbers here: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/16578

FYI you should have used llama.cpp to do the benchmarks. It performs almost 20x faster than ollama for the gpt-oss-120b model. Here are some samples results on my spark:

  ggml_cuda_init: found 1 CUDA devices:
    Device 0: NVIDIA GB10, compute capability 12.1, VMM: yes
  | model                          |       size |     params | backend    | ngl | n_ubatch | fa |            test |                  t/s |
  | ------------------------------ | ---------: | ---------: | ---------- | --: | -------: | -: | --------------: | -------------------: |
  | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE          |  11.27 GiB |    20.91 B | CUDA       |  99 |     2048 |  1 |          pp4096 |       3564.31 ± 9.91 |
  | gpt-oss 20B MXFP4 MoE          |  11.27 GiB |    20.91 B | CUDA       |  99 |     2048 |  1 |            tg32 |         53.93 ± 1.71 |
  | gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE         |  59.02 GiB |   116.83 B | CUDA       |  99 |     2048 |  1 |          pp4096 |      1792.32 ± 34.74 |
  | gpt-oss 120B MXFP4 MoE         |  59.02 GiB |   116.83 B | CUDA       |  99 |     2048 |  1 |            tg32 |         38.54 ± 3.10 |

They should add "custom endpoint" support instead [0].

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/249605

Gemma 3n (the model used by this app) would run on any Apple Silicon device (even with 8GB RAM).

The llama.cpp tools and examples download the models by default to a OS-specific cache folder [0]. We try to follow the HF standard (as discussed in the linked thread), though the layout of the llama.cpp cache is not the same atm. Not sure about the plans for RamaLama, but it might be something worth to consider.

[0] https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/issues/7252

Yes, exactly. You can set --ctx-size to a smaller value if you know that you will not hit the limit of 32k - this will save you VRAM.

To control how much global context to keep in the ring buffer (i.e. the context that is being reused to enrich the local context), you can adjust the "ring_n_chunks" and "rink_chunk_size". With the default settings, this amounts to about 8k tokens of context on our codebases when the ring buffer is full, which is a conservative setting. Increasing these numbers will make the context bigger, will improve the quality but will affect the performance.

There are a few other tricks to reduce the compute for the local context (i.e. the 1k batch of tokens), so that in practice, a smaller amount is processed. This further saves compute during the prefill.

The primary tricks for reducing the latency are around context reuse, meaning that the computed KV cache of tokens from previous requests is reused for new requests and thus computation is saved.

To get high-quality completions, you need to provide a large context of your codebase so that the generated suggestion is more inline with your style and implementation logic. However, naively increasing the context will quickly hit a computation limit because each request would need to compute (a.k.a prefill) a lot of tokens.

The KV cache shifts used here is an approach to reuse the cache of old tokens by "shifting" them in new absolute positions in the new context. This way a request that would normally require a context of lets say 10k tokens, could be processed more quickly by computing just lets say 500 tokens and reusing the cache of the other 9.5k tokens, thus cutting the compute ~10 fold.

The --ctx-size 0 CLI arg simply tells the server to allocate memory buffers for the maximum context size supported by the model. For the case of Qwen Coder models, this corresponds to 32k tokens.

The batch sizes are related to how much local context around your cursor to use, along with the global context from the ring buffer. This is described in more detail in the links, but simply put: decreasing the batch size will make the completion faster, but with less quality.

Appreciate the feedback!

Currently, there isn't a user-friendly way to disable the stats from showing apart from modifying the "'show_info': 0" value directly in the plugin implementation. These things will be improved with time and will become more user-friendly.

A few extra optimizations will soon land which will further improve the experience:

- Speculative FIM

- Multiple suggestions

There are 4 stopping criteria atm:

- Generation time exceeded (configurable in the plugin config)

- Number of tokens exceeded (not the case since you increased it)

- Indentation - stops generating if the next line has shorter indent than the first line

- Small probability of the sampled token

Most likely you are hitting the last criteria. It's something that should be improved in some way, but I am not very sure how. Currently, it is using a very basic token sampling strategy with a custom threshold logic to stop generating when the token probability is too low. Likely this logic is too conservative.

Yes, I think it is surprising that it works.

I think a fairly large amount, though can't give a good number. I have been using Github Copilot from the very early days and with the release of Qwen Coder last year have fully switched to using local completions. I don't use the chat workflow to code though, only FIM.

Hi HN, happy to see this here!

I highly recommend to take a look at the technical details of the server implementation that enables large context usage with this plugin - I think it is interesting and has some cool ideas [0].

Also, the same plugin is available for VS Code [1].

Let me know if you have any questions about the plugin - happy to explain. Btw, the performance has improved compared to what is seen in the README videos thanks to client-side caching.

[0] - https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/pull/9787

[1] - https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.vscode

So far is going great! Good community, having fun. Many ideas to explore :-)

> Thanks to the amazing work of @ggerganov on llama.cpp which made this possible. If there is anything that you wish to exist in an ideal local AI app, I'd love to hear about it.

The app looks great! Likewise, if you have any requests or ideas for improving llama.cpp, please don't hesitate to open an issue / discussion in the repo

I've found lowering the temperature and disabling the repetition penalty can help [0]. My explanation is that the repetition penalty penalizes the end of sentences and sort of forces the generation to go on instead of stopping.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/17e855d/llamacp...

Yes, I was planning to do this back then, but other stuff came up. There are many different ways in which this simple example can be improved:

- better detection of when speech ends (currently basic adaptive threshold)

- use small LLM for quick response with something generic while big LLM computes

- TTS streaming in chunks or sentences

One of the better OSS versions of such chatbot I think is https://github.com/yacineMTB/talk. Though probably many other similar projects also exist by now.

Heh, funny to see this popup here :)

The performance on Apple Silicon should be much better today compared to what is shown in the video as whisper.cpp now runs fully on the GPU and there have been significant improvements in llama.cpp generation speed over the last few months.

Yes, I assumed that checking the weights for presence and amount of outliers is not something that is usually done and effects on this can be overlooked. If my assumption is wrong and researchers do usually look at such metrics, then my question is not very relevant.

Agree - the "how" is straightforward

> I don't recall the details exactly, but I don't think it ever did very much.

How would you have known if the trick actually reduces the outliers in the weights? Even if the transformer quality does not improve overall, having less outliers as a result is very beneficial for more accurate quantization of the data

It was designed in #915 (read just the OP and the linked PRs at the end) and the implementation pretty much follows it closely, at least for the Metal backend. The CUDA and OpenCL backends are currently slightly coupled in ggml as they started developing before #915, but I think we'll resolve this eventually.

#915 - https://github.com/ggerganov/llama.cpp/discussions/915

My POV is that llama.cpp is primarily a playground for adding new features to the core ggml library and in the long run an interface for efficient LLM inference. The purpose of the examples in the repo is to demonstrate ways of how to use the ggml library and the LLM interface. The examples are decoupled from the primary code - i.e. you can delete all of them and the project will continue to function and build properly. So we can afford to expand them more freely as long as people find them useful and there is enough help for maintaining them. Still, we try to keep the 3rd party dependencies to a minimum so that the build process is simple and accessible

There was a similar "dilemma" about the GPU support - initially I didn't envision adding GPU support to the core library as I thought that things will become very entangled and hard to maintain. But eventually, we found a way to extend the library with different GPU backends in a relatively well decoupled way. So now, we have various developers maintaining and contributing to the backends in a nice independent way. Each backend can be deleted and you will still be able to build the project and use it.

So I guess we are optimizing for how easy it is to delete things :)

Note that the project is still pretty much a "big hack" - it supports just LLaMA models and derivatives, therefore it is easy atm. The more "general purpose" it becomes, the more difficult things become to design and maintain. This is the main challenge I'm thinking how to solve, but for sure keeping stuff minimalistic and small is a great help so far

> What if GG didn't want such a thing? When is something like this better for a separately maintained repo and not a main merge? How do you know when it is OK to submit a PR to add something like this without overstepping (or is it always?)

I try to explain my vision for the project in the issues and the discussion. I think most of the developers are very well aligned with it and can already tell what is a good addition or not

I'm planning to write code and have fun!

The weights are preprocessed into integer quants combined with scaling factors in various configurations (4, 5, 8-bits and recently more exotic 2, 3 and 6-bit quants). At runtime, we use efficient SIMD implementations to perform the matrix multiplication at integer level, carefully optimizing for both compute and memory bandwidth. Similar strategies are applied when running GPU inference - using custom kernels for fast Matrix x Vector multiplications

ggml started with focus on CPU inference, but lately we have been augmenting it with GPU support. Although still in development, it already has partial CUDA, OpenCL and Metal backend support

For videos without subtitles one could chain Whisper to auto-generate transcripts, though that would require downloading the audio and processing it