LocalLLaMA

3379 readers

5 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.

Rules:

Rule 1 - No harassment or personal character attacks of community members. I.E no namecalling, no generalizing entire groups of people that make up our community, no baseless personal insults.

Rule 2 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning models to cryptocurrency. I.E no comparing the usefulness of models to that of NFTs, no comparing the resource usage required to train a model is anything close to maintaining a blockchain/ mining for crypto, no implying its just a fad/bubble that will leave people with nothing of value when it burst.

Rule 3 - No comparing artificial intelligence/machine learning to simple text prediction algorithms. I.E statements such as "llms are basically just simple text predictions like what your phone keyboard autocorrect uses, and they're still using the same algorithms since <over 10 years ago>.

Rule 4 - No implying that models are devoid of purpose or potential for enriching peoples lives.

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] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know of any technical problems preventing that per se. But the thunderbolt gpu docks seem quite pricey. You can get half a PC for that money. Or a whole used one. These old ExpressPort adapters used to be cheaper if I remember correctly (the ones which got some PCIE lanes out of an old ThinkPad with some flexible flat cable to a dedicated pcb.) The downside was, it's just a few PCIE lanes. And that's probably also a downside with the thunderbolt version of that. It'd take some time to transfer the model into the GPU's memory this way. But after that it should be fast.

I mean if the drivers etc work with that setup. I'm not an expert. And it's been a while since I last saw people using adapters like that. I wouldn't spend 250€ on that. It's too much compared to the price of that NVidia card and also too much compared to other solutions. I can get a refurbished office PC for that.