speculative decoding actually worth it on mini PC

[cacheline]

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

It feels like the conversation has shifted hard toward inference and serving details lately, and honestly that makes sense once you start dealing with structured output.

Curious whether that lines up with what other people are seeing.

This is mostly for local work rather than public serving.

[cacheline]

This keeps coming up in conversation so I figured I'd start a thread.

I'd approach it in a boring order. Start by verifying the driver/runtime combo, then test with a smaller prompt, then look at prefix caching. Not glamorous advice, but repeatable baselines save a lot of time.

[mintforge]

Not sure I agree there. I wouldn't optimize around that first. On my side the bigger swing came from the runtime and not the model.

[cacheline]

I think the bottleneck is somewhere else. I wouldn't optimize around that first. On my side the bigger swing came from the runtime and not the model. Not saying you're wrong, just that I wouldn't lock that in as the lesson yet.

[cacheline]

That matches what I was seeing. That matches what I saw on Threadripper box. The biggest change for me was simplifying the stack instead of adding one more optimization layer.

[marbletrack]

worth checking the driver first.

[cacheline]

worth checking the driver first.

[cacheline]

What worked for me was pretty simple. Start by verifying the driver/runtime combo, then test with a smaller prompt, then look at structured output. A lot of these threads end up being one bad config plus a pile of conclusions drawn from it.

[batchcraft]

That matches what I was seeing. I ended up in about the same place using llama.cpp. I got better results once I stopped chasing one metric and just looked at whether the workflow felt usable.

[cacheline]

That matches what I was seeing. That matches what I saw on 4090. I got better results once I stopped chasing one metric and just looked at whether the workflow felt usable.