The VRAM barrier is officially dead. I just ran Qwen 3.8 Flash Next (MoE) 125B A6B with a 250,000 context window on a single 24GB RTX 4090. 21 tokens/sec decode. 364 t/s prefill. no mtp. no dflash. no kv cache quantization! We are running datacenter models on consumer hardware. Tested on Ubuntu 22 | CUDA 13.0 | PCIe 4.0 x16 | 110 GB DDR4 System RAM with a continuous 28k prompt across all runs. ### The Benchmarks & Scaling # 1. Hybrid Offload (-ncmoe 40 @ 80k Context) Offloaded 40 expert layers to the GPU, pushing VRAM to the ceiling. ./build/bin/llama-server -m Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-UD-Q4_K_XL-00001-of-00004.gguf -c 80000 --port 8080 -v --fit off -b 4096 -ub 4096 -ncmoe 40 Prefill: 383.85 t/s | Decode: 22.52 t/s Footprint: 23.85 GB VRAM | 97 GB RAM # 2. Full CPU MoE Offload (-cmoe @ 80k Context) Pinned all 512 expert layers to DDR4 RAM (-cmoe), keeping attention on the 4090. llama.cpp flags: (Same as above, replace -ncmoe 40 with -cmoe) Prefill: 355.72 t/s | Decode: 20.84 t/s Footprint: 11.66 GB VRAM (12GB+ VRAM freed up!) | 110 GB RAM # 3. The 180,000 Context Run Prefill: 357.75 t/s | Decode: 20.98 t/s | VRAM: 15.6 GB | RAM: 110 GB # 4. The 250,000 Context Absolute Ceiling ./build/bin/llama-server -m Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-UD-Q4_K_XL-00001-of-00004.gguf -c 250000 --port 8080 -v --fit off -b 4096 -ub 4096 -cmoe Prefill: 364.29 t/s | Decode: 20.97 t/s Footprint: 18.3 GB VRAM (Still ~5.7 GB of VRAM headroom!) | 110 GB RAM ### Key Insights: -b 4096 -ub 4096: doubles the prompt ingestion from ~150 to 364+ t/s. -cmoe Free Lunch: Shifting expert layers to DDR4 RAM slashes VRAM from 24GB to 11.6GB with virtually zero decode penalty (22.5 -> 20.9 t/s), enabling the 250k context ceiling. Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next (UD-Q4_K_XL) is a massive 111.4 GB model split across 4 shards. To run this architecture, you must build from the experimental PR branch (#27742#) by @danielhanchen: git clone && cd llama.cpp git fetch origin pull/27742/head:qwen-next && git checkout qwen-next cmake -B build -DGGML_CUDA=ON -DCMAKE_CUDA_ARCHITECTURES=native -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS=OFF cmake --build build --config Release -j $(nproc) --target llama-server A single 4090 paired with 100 GB of cheap DDR4 RAM will comfortably serve production grade 125B inference. While Qwen 3.8 27B (dense) still holds the crown for single 3090/4090 rigs, Flash Next proves 125B hybrid models are officially viable on consumer hardware. Hugging Face GGUF link and complete performance telemetry graphs are dropped in the replies below. GLM 5.3 Flash VS Qwen 3.8 Flash Next, which one takes the open weights crown this week?

Ziphu achieved 3× performance gains and Nvidia level cost parity on domestic Chinese chips for serving GLM 3.5 Flash!. The wildest detail in the GLM-5.3-Flash release: Ziphu used a GLM 5.3 infrastructure agent to write custom GPU kernels, debug bottlenecks, and build an inference engine on top of SGLang, creating a self optimizing feedback loop that achieved 3× performance gains and Nvidia level cost parity on domestic Chinese chips.

I told you to claim your free 16GB NVIDIA GPU for learning Local LLMs. Now I’m going to show you how to double its inference speed without touching the hardware. Google Colab gives you an enterprise grade NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU for free, roughly 4 hours every single day. It is the absolute perfect sandbox for learning AI engineering, testing inference flags, and pushing massive context windows. The local AI timeline is moving way too fast. If you aren't using Multi Token Prediction (MTP) yet, you are leaving massive performance on the table. I just pushed DeepMind’s Gemma 4 26B to 64.9 t/s on this exact free tier. Let's look at the raw benchmark data running on an Ubuntu Linux environment with the latest compiled llama.cpp binaries and quantized GGUFs from Unsloth via HuggingFace: # Qwen 3.5 9B (Dense): Base: [ Prompt: 626.7 t/s | Generation: 21.0 t/s ] With MTP: [ Prompt: 539.1 t/s | Generation: 24.8 t/s ] # Gemma 4 26B QAT (MoE): Base: [ Prompt: 634.2 t/s | Generation: 48.3 t/s ] With MTP: [ Prompt: 572.1 t/s | Generation: 64.9 t/s ] If you are paying attention, this single Colab notebook reveals 3 massive observations about the current state of local LLMs: # 1. The MTP Speedup (Software Overclocking) Standard autoregressive decoding guesses one token at a time. MTP acts like a highly optimized, built in speculative decoder. It predicts multiple future tokens at once and the main model verifies them in parallel. The result? Zero accuracy loss and a massive throughput increase. Gemma jumped from 48 to 65 t/s just by flipping a flag. # 2. The MoE Paradox (Bigger is Faster) How does a 26B parameter model absolutely destroy a 9B model in raw speed on the exact same hardware? Architecture. Qwen 3.5 9B is a dense model. it activates all 9 billion parameters for every single token. Gemma 4 26B is a Mixture of Experts (MoE) model. It routes data efficiently, activating only 4B parameters per token. You get the reasoning capabilities of a 26B model with the compute cost of a 4B model. 3. Thinking Efficiency When I ran the exact same complex prompt on both models, the larger MoE spent significantly fewer "thinking" tokens to arrive at the correct answer. A smarter model doesn't just give better answers; it gets to the point faster, saving you compute cycles and preserving your context window. # Want to run this yourself? Here are the exact llama.cpp CLI commands. For Qwen (MTP is baked into the main model): ./llama-cli -m Qwen3.5-9B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf -p "Explain quantum computing." -n 2000 -c 8000 -ngl 99 -fa on --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 For Gemma (Using a separate lightweight draft model): ./llama-cli -m gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-qat-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf --model-draft mtp-gemma-4-26B-A4B-it.gguf -p "Explain quantum computing." -n 2000 -c 8000 -ngl 99 -fa on --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 4 --spec-draft-p-min 0.7 Stop waiting for a $3,000 rig. Boot up Colab, pull these models, and start building your stack. I’ve put together a completely free, cell by cell Google Colab notebook that automates this entire workflow so you can test it yourself in 5 minutes and learn. Link to the notebook is in the comments below. Experiemt with different MTP parameters, context windows and post your results in the comments.

I just ran Gemma 4 31B on @CerebrasSystems at 1,800+ tokens/sec and it's multimodal. For context: that's 35x faster than a typical GPU endpoint, and the first token (reasoning included) lands in 1.5 seconds. This isn't a benchmark slide, I recorded the inference live. Prompt I used: "Create a simulation of an iPhone. Include at least one working dummy note taking app, a functional notification pulldown, high quality graphics, single HTML file, any libs via CDN." - Generation time: 3 seconds. - Notes app worked. - Notification panel worked. - Rendered first try. This is what wafer-scale inference unlocks, not just "faster," but a different category of product. When generation is this fast, you stop waiting and start iterating in real time. Why this matters: Gemma 4 31B is Google DeepMind's flagship open weight model, Apache 2.0 licensed, dense (not MoE), and built for efficiency over raw parameter count. It scores close to Claude Haiku 4.5 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (30 vs 29) but runs ~18x faster on Cerebras. It's also the first multimodal model on Cerebras's platform, meaning you can now feed it screenshots, documents, charts, and UI states at wafer scale speed. # Applications I'm most excited about: - Screenshot → Insight: Drop in a dashboard or document screenshot, get structured findings back instantly. no waiting, no batching. - Live UI generation: Full interactive interfaces (like my iPhone sim) generated and rendered in under 2 seconds. - Screenshot -> Patch: Feed it a broken UI + console error, get a minimal code fix and verification steps back. - Computer use & agentic loops: See -> reason -> act - verify, fast enough to keep a human in the loop instead of waiting on the model. - Long context summarization: Full research reports condensed into decision ready summaries you can read and requery in one sitting. The bigger unlock isn't the speed number itself, it's that agentic and multimodal loops (see -> reason -> output -> tool call -> verify -> retry) finally run in real time instead of feeling sluggish. As Logan Kilpatrick (@OfficialLoganK) put it: "If every model was doing 2,000 tokens per second, you wouldn't build the same product and just have it be faster, you'd build different products." Gemma 4 31B is live now on Cerebras Inference Cloud in public preview. If you're building multimodal, agentic, or real time apps, this is worth testing today. What would you build with such insane inference throughput?