LocalLLaMA

2849 readers

18 users here now

Welcome to LocalLLaMA! Here we discuss running and developing machine learning models at home. Lets explore cutting edge open source neural network technology together.

Get support from the community! Ask questions, share prompts, discuss benchmarks, get hyped at the latest and greatest model releases! Enjoy talking about our awesome hobby.

As ambassadors of the self-hosting machine learning community, we strive to support each other and share our enthusiasm in a positive constructive way.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Dock GPU to Laptop or to small SOC? (feddit.de)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

7 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Afaik most LLMs run purely on the GPU, dont they?

So if I have an Nvidia Titan X with 12GB of RAM, could I plug this into my laptop and offload the load?

I am using Fedora, so getting the NVIDIA drivers would be... fun and already probably a dealbreaker (wouldnt want to run proprietary drivers on my daily system).

I know that using ExpressPort adapters people where able to use GPUs externally, and this is possible with thunderbolt too, isnt it?

The question is, how well does this work?

Or would using a small SOC to host a webserver for the interface and do all the computing on the GPU make more sense?

I am curious about the difficulties here, ARM SOC and proprietary drivers? Laptop over USB-c (maybe not thunderbolt?) and a GPU just for the AI tasks...

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

You're probably going to run into the problem that people didn't anticipate your strategy if you try to run a model on a GPU with way more memory than the host system. I'm not sure many execution frameworks can go straight from disk to GPU RAM. Also, storage speed for loading the model might be an issue on an SOC that boots off e.g. an SD card.

An eGPU dock should do CUDA just as well as an internal GPU, as far as I know. But you would need the drivers installed.