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> Once you've finished reading the next article on HN about a 5 tps Xeon, your task will be complete.

If I spend 10 minutes reading an article, that would only generate 3000 tokens.

That’s not counting the prompt processing time.

We have very different expectations for LLMs if your tasks only take a couple thousand tokens and you’re happy waiting 10 minutes for it.

> Yes, with top-tier GPU farms you can hit hundreds of tokens per second

My 5090 gets hundreds of tokens per second with this model. No farm needed. I’d have to double check but I think even a $1000 Intel B70 might break 100 tokens per second.

> But if the old Xeon in the closet can get useful work done at 5 tokens per second, there are lots of people and lots of use cases where a free, unlimited 5 TPS stream is worth more than paying a dollars per day to get access to a 500 TPS source.

If that old Xeon pulls 200W from the wall and you pay national average electricity costs, it’s going to cost $0.90 per day to run it.

I would rather pay a dollar per day, get my answers 100X faster, and not have an old Xeon heating up my house.

You could suspend it to ram, and only wake it up on request, it takes 2 seconds on my box.
It’s not a cost savings relative to paying API prices even if you’re suspending it.

This is an option if you must run local inference, you’re not sensitive to speed, and the budget is low.

It’s not going to be cheaper than paying API prices for the model though.