Something to keep in mind with aggressive quantisation, is that it's been empirically proven [1] that (1) quantisation has non-linear performance behaviour, and (2) generally the peak size-to-performance ratio occurs at 4-bit; anything lower and you will see significant reduction in performance.
Also, I've been playing with speech models for the past 2 years, and for me anything below 8-bit is a huge drop in quality; so quantisation for LLMs and for other bespoke modality models, is not 1:1.
I think your leading statement is a bit more authoritative than what the linked paper actually demonstrates. It demonstrates your claimed qualities for specific algorithms, methodologies, and models.
It explicitly says that Quantization-Aware Training is out of scope, may reveal different trends and has potential for extreme quantization. Heavily-quantized model releases today generally use QAT or something similar, so I don't think the paper can be universally applied to modern quants (e.g. [0]).
That said, I don't see any evidence that TFA does any of that so the paper's claims may be quite applicable there.
I recently did some toying around with (very) small language models (<200k). I used QAT from the beginning and was surprised that I got byte identical results from the int8 model vs the float32 one.
If that scales with parameters I don't see why QAT shouldn't be the norm.
(As I was only comparing the QAT f32 model vs the quantization its possible that a not QAT f32 would have performed even better)
I imagine that it's just the non-linearity of audio makes it easily apparent how much quantization really matters, and that benchmaxxing is so ingrained in LLMs that if you simply run them through benchmarks, they can do well under quantization, when in reality, they have a similar drop off that they do in audio, it just doesn't slam you in the face at every turn as obviously.
To put this on perspective, consider that with 128GB of unified RAM it can run even fast: https://x.com/antirez/status/2119392658661749175
Like, coding-agent acceptably fast. See later in the reply for the prefill at ~300 t/s but can go even faster for larger prefills.
I've recently set up Ollama on my homelab server, which is a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard with a Ryzen 7 7840HS and 64 GiB of DDR5 RAM. It's no AMD Strix Halo, but it's a laptop CPU with a fairly beefy GPU and a decent amount of memory bandwidth.
I've had decent results with gemma4:26b (although it's more like batch processing when used as a coding agent) and my experience so far is globally in line with the first two sections of the ARCHITECTURE.md: fast with small contexts but performance degrades fast as its size increases. If the rest of the contents of that document are true, I'll need to retune my setup from scratch.
I use lemonade llama.cpp with a 2-bit quant of DeepseekV4F 0731 that runs at about 15 tokens a second. I use it as my "smol" model in omp, with default going to OpenCode hosted Deepseek (faster inference).
I haven't done work lately on Dwarf Star. I got it running a few weeks ago and had my agent make a couple of modifications to it to get it running, but it wasn't materially better than my lemonade setup. I might revisit after this post, though!
That video seems to show it takes ~4 seconds to process 43 input tokens. Considering the amount of tokens coding-agents chew through, even when just exploring and not even implementing anything, feels far away from "acceptably fast". Say one file is 500 tokens (small file), it'd take ~a minute just to process it?
You mention "See later in the reply for the prefill at ~300 t/s" but I didn't see that in the video nor in any of the Twitter replies, could you link where that is supposed to be happening? Is that warm context perchance?
43 tokens is a tiny input context when compared with anything agentic. Prefill on SSD streaming is proportionally much faster with larger contexts, because expert loads can be reused across tokens and the engine can also opt to preload entire model layers into memory, without waiting for the outcome of expert routing.
all my local models do just fine (128GB Strix Halo, 72GB Blackwell) loading data. I'm not sure you were sold the right bill of goods for "agentic" work. I keep these things busy via mind power for a few hours, then get exhausted.
So I implenented a task queue so when I do have all the ideas, I can just set them to work, and "chew" through the work.
I get that you can concievably get 100 agents to do something interesting, but 99% of my work doesn't seem to need to divine naiver stokes.
Other than that, you might just have a skill issue if you rely so heavily of spinning up a bunch of agents to tell you what the next TODO item is.
Ironically, local models are much more efficient when running multiple parallel agents, provided that KV storage requirements are not excessive (not an issue with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash). It does not make any individual agent faster, but it does raise overall throughput quite a bit. The limit is then set by compute constraints rather than memory bandwidth, so something like DGX Spark or AMD Strix/Gorgon Halo can be expected to do better than the Apple-based alternative.
This mentality is really pervasive and yet I've found when a lower than 4-bit quant of a given model was all I could use, then using that was often better than using a 4-bit quant of a model that I could. YMMV. It just really made me rethink my stance on the whole thing. Most people likely see something like 2-bit and just feel like the want to puke without ever actually learning whether or not it can handle their tasks and how well relative to other models they run. I've been running Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at Q4, but was crazy surprised at the performance of Unsloth's IQ1_M of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash.
Deepseek v4 flash 0731 in a 2-bit quant has been useful for me. Other models don't seem to hold up nearly as well at 2-bit. Most of my other models are 5-6 bit quants because of this.
probably; 32-64 is the range where local models get extraordinarily useful, and in my experience any sub-4 quants get ridiculously incoherent, which is why those models tend to try to 'wow' people with tok/s rather than benchmarks.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next fits in 80GB on strix halo. That's when I started real "vibe" coding with them. Speed is still an issue if I want to move fast and break things, but I've built a little universe for development (I assume many people have also) and it's cruising.
But yeah, 32-64 is the gateway I think. If Qwen4 can make a leap in the flast-next MoE and hit 64 GB on VRAM w/context, that's definitely the cloud killer to me.
Always check the label and if pain persists, see your doctor!
The ISTA accuracy looks good on that page, but it's only a chosen handful. Instead, look at most of the graphs on Unsloth's Qwen 3.8 Flash Next - https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next
As always, check the quant vs KLD graphs (half way down that page).. I found that not all quants are the same - Unsloth's GLM Q4 -> Q3 degrades a lot faster than their Minimax M3.1 Q4 -> Q3 ggufs.
(and before you crap on it, this is not the same as the original Bonsai, this newer one is much better, and upstream support in llama.cpp etc. is being worked on)
Reddit is flooded with these breathless headlines “xyz tokens/s on my light switch”. It’s always quantizations below 4 bits per weight. Mostly useless.
Strata, Project Maya, the FP8 3x speedup on memory-bound workloads on Ampere cards and now llama-mod chip. I’m amazed with all these optimisations and thinking outside the box. Well done, don’t stop!
hm... this is the first time. TIL something from the HN comments more than the actual article. I'm relatively new to the AI space and the idea of quantization is something I'll have to take forward when evaluating future models.
This is quite an obnoxious Readme.md with AI slop. It wraps around llama.cpp but without seeing what platform assumptions it makes its unclear for other readers whether this is worth testing.
I very recently spent a lot of time using deepseek v4 flash 0731 before it was superseded by newer more capable things (glm 5.3-flash, v4.1 flash 1017, etc) and I am exceedingly skeptical of anyone that claims to get good QUALITY results out of it at that size. Whatever they're doing to shrink it will make it worse than an unsloth Q2XS quantization of it or equivalent. That size of model needs something like 150GB of RAM to run properly with full unquantized kv cache and not with a ton of training data discarded.
I remain exceedingly skeptical of people who are claiming to run fairly large models in ridiculously tiny sizes. For comparison a 'regular' version of v4 flash 0731 has file sizes more like this: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-GGUF
Even the 97GB Q2XS will show very significant divergence from the full precision thing. Running a lobotomized model just to say you're doing it is really not accomplishing anything special.
The quantization is probably the most important thing to know and its not clear at all from the dense word salad
It looks like 2 bit. I'm really struggling to understand why this got so many upvotes. Colibri and others already covered this ground months ago.
Something to keep in mind with aggressive quantisation, is that it's been empirically proven [1] that (1) quantisation has non-linear performance behaviour, and (2) generally the peak size-to-performance ratio occurs at 4-bit; anything lower and you will see significant reduction in performance.
Also, I've been playing with speech models for the past 2 years, and for me anything below 8-bit is a huge drop in quality; so quantisation for LLMs and for other bespoke modality models, is not 1:1.
[1] "Reliability Scaling Laws for Quantized Large Language Models", TUM, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.10855
I think your leading statement is a bit more authoritative than what the linked paper actually demonstrates. It demonstrates your claimed qualities for specific algorithms, methodologies, and models.
It explicitly says that Quantization-Aware Training is out of scope, may reveal different trends and has potential for extreme quantization. Heavily-quantized model releases today generally use QAT or something similar, so I don't think the paper can be universally applied to modern quants (e.g. [0]).
That said, I don't see any evidence that TFA does any of that so the paper's claims may be quite applicable there.
[0]: https://huggingface.co/vcruz305/DSV4.1-Flash-1017-SAGE-REXL3...
I recently did some toying around with (very) small language models (<200k). I used QAT from the beginning and was surprised that I got byte identical results from the int8 model vs the float32 one.
If that scales with parameters I don't see why QAT shouldn't be the norm.
(As I was only comparing the QAT f32 model vs the quantization its possible that a not QAT f32 would have performed even better)
I imagine that it's just the non-linearity of audio makes it easily apparent how much quantization really matters, and that benchmaxxing is so ingrained in LLMs that if you simply run them through benchmarks, they can do well under quantization, when in reality, they have a similar drop off that they do in audio, it just doesn't slam you in the face at every turn as obviously.
To put this on perspective, consider that with 128GB of unified RAM it can run even fast: https://x.com/antirez/status/2119392658661749175 Like, coding-agent acceptably fast. See later in the reply for the prefill at ~300 t/s but can go even faster for larger prefills.
I've recently set up Ollama on my homelab server, which is a Topton N17 micro-ATX motherboard with a Ryzen 7 7840HS and 64 GiB of DDR5 RAM. It's no AMD Strix Halo, but it's a laptop CPU with a fairly beefy GPU and a decent amount of memory bandwidth.
I've had decent results with gemma4:26b (although it's more like batch processing when used as a coding agent) and my experience so far is globally in line with the first two sections of the ARCHITECTURE.md: fast with small contexts but performance degrades fast as its size increases. If the rest of the contents of that document are true, I'll need to retune my setup from scratch.
This seems great. I have 128GB of unified RAM and a AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 that I can use but I feel I'm still not using it as well as I could...
The main/best setup I have running so far is qwen flash next with halogen-server.
But if anyone knows if and how one can run even more impressive stuff, please let me know!
I use lemonade llama.cpp with a 2-bit quant of DeepseekV4F 0731 that runs at about 15 tokens a second. I use it as my "smol" model in omp, with default going to OpenCode hosted Deepseek (faster inference).
I haven't done work lately on Dwarf Star. I got it running a few weeks ago and had my agent make a couple of modifications to it to get it running, but it wasn't materially better than my lemonade setup. I might revisit after this post, though!
https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/llamacpp-rocm
That video seems to show it takes ~4 seconds to process 43 input tokens. Considering the amount of tokens coding-agents chew through, even when just exploring and not even implementing anything, feels far away from "acceptably fast". Say one file is 500 tokens (small file), it'd take ~a minute just to process it?
You mention "See later in the reply for the prefill at ~300 t/s" but I didn't see that in the video nor in any of the Twitter replies, could you link where that is supposed to be happening? Is that warm context perchance?
43 tokens is a tiny input context when compared with anything agentic. Prefill on SSD streaming is proportionally much faster with larger contexts, because expert loads can be reused across tokens and the engine can also opt to preload entire model layers into memory, without waiting for the outcome of expert routing.
all my local models do just fine (128GB Strix Halo, 72GB Blackwell) loading data. I'm not sure you were sold the right bill of goods for "agentic" work. I keep these things busy via mind power for a few hours, then get exhausted.
So I implenented a task queue so when I do have all the ideas, I can just set them to work, and "chew" through the work.
I get that you can concievably get 100 agents to do something interesting, but 99% of my work doesn't seem to need to divine naiver stokes.
Other than that, you might just have a skill issue if you rely so heavily of spinning up a bunch of agents to tell you what the next TODO item is.
Ironically, local models are much more efficient when running multiple parallel agents, provided that KV storage requirements are not excessive (not an issue with DeepSeek 4.1 Flash). It does not make any individual agent faster, but it does raise overall throughput quite a bit. The limit is then set by compute constraints rather than memory bandwidth, so something like DGX Spark or AMD Strix/Gorgon Halo can be expected to do better than the Apple-based alternative.
At which quantization? That's the only thing I want to know.
EDIT: I think it's 2 bit? If so, would be curious to see the quality of the output. Not great, I think.
Everything lower than 4/5 is really bad
This mentality is really pervasive and yet I've found when a lower than 4-bit quant of a given model was all I could use, then using that was often better than using a 4-bit quant of a model that I could. YMMV. It just really made me rethink my stance on the whole thing. Most people likely see something like 2-bit and just feel like the want to puke without ever actually learning whether or not it can handle their tasks and how well relative to other models they run. I've been running Qwen3.8-Flash-Next at Q4, but was crazy surprised at the performance of Unsloth's IQ1_M of DeepSeek v4.1 Flash.
You don’t know what you don’t know
Deepseek v4 flash 0731 in a 2-bit quant has been useful for me. Other models don't seem to hold up nearly as well at 2-bit. Most of my other models are 5-6 bit quants because of this.
Well it's bad compared to the original model, but is it bad compared to what else you could run in 64 GB?
probably; 32-64 is the range where local models get extraordinarily useful, and in my experience any sub-4 quants get ridiculously incoherent, which is why those models tend to try to 'wow' people with tok/s rather than benchmarks.
haven't tried it yet though.
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next fits in 80GB on strix halo. That's when I started real "vibe" coding with them. Speed is still an issue if I want to move fast and break things, but I've built a little universe for development (I assume many people have also) and it's cruising.
But yeah, 32-64 is the gateway I think. If Qwen4 can make a leap in the flast-next MoE and hit 64 GB on VRAM w/context, that's definitely the cloud killer to me.
I’m wondering myself: Do bigger models suffer less from quantization? Are there papers?
They seem to degrade a lot less.
You don't need papers, good quants are usually published with benchmark data, for example: https://huggingface.co/ISTA-DASLab/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017-... which maintains parity with FP8 even at 2 bit.
Always check the label and if pain persists, see your doctor!
The ISTA accuracy looks good on that page, but it's only a chosen handful. Instead, look at most of the graphs on Unsloth's Qwen 3.8 Flash Next - https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.8-next
As always, check the quant vs KLD graphs (half way down that page).. I found that not all quants are the same - Unsloth's GLM Q4 -> Q3 degrades a lot faster than their Minimax M3.1 Q4 -> Q3 ggufs.
you can get a lot done with models well under that - the google and qwen 20-30B class models are fantastic
This but also the kv quantization shouldn’t be lower than 8 bits.
Next frontier is achieving good output with that kind of quant dimension
There are solutions for that: https://prismml.com/news/bonsai-2-27b
(and before you crap on it, this is not the same as the original Bonsai, this newer one is much better, and upstream support in llama.cpp etc. is being worked on)
I’m confused too and the slop readme doesn’t help at all.
> Shrinks DeepSeek-V4-Flash from 76.87 GiB (which crashes in OOM on 64 GB Linux) down to 56.56 GiB
And later
> Standard IQ2_XXS (76.87 GiB, Unpatched)
Except unsloth’s IQ2_XXS GGUF is 91GB, even their smallest IQ1_S is 82.5GB. So I wonder which model/quant the number even refers to.
Also the mentions of “compression” and “MoE pruning” also make it sound lobotomized even more than unsloth’s IQ1 quants.
This 100%
Reddit is flooded with these breathless headlines “xyz tokens/s on my light switch”. It’s always quantizations below 4 bits per weight. Mostly useless.
I wish people would clean up the ai spammed emoji from the github readme. The readability is just horrible.
Removing the emoji won't help the readability much on this one. The LLM vibes are dialed up to 11, sadly.
I wish people would just write their readmes themselves.
you're supposed to have your LLM summarize it
Strata, Project Maya, the FP8 3x speedup on memory-bound workloads on Ampere cards and now llama-mod chip. I’m amazed with all these optimisations and thinking outside the box. Well done, don’t stop!
This is a very impressive achievement in an unexpected direction. I'm really looking forward to trying out qwen on this system.
hm... this is the first time. TIL something from the HN comments more than the actual article. I'm relatively new to the AI space and the idea of quantization is something I'll have to take forward when evaluating future models.
This is quite an obnoxious Readme.md with AI slop. It wraps around llama.cpp but without seeing what platform assumptions it makes its unclear for other readers whether this is worth testing.
Anyone else finding these AI generated pages really hard to read?
Everyone else, yes. This one is particularly mindbendingly bad. It is almost not human-readable without LLM summary.
I very recently spent a lot of time using deepseek v4 flash 0731 before it was superseded by newer more capable things (glm 5.3-flash, v4.1 flash 1017, etc) and I am exceedingly skeptical of anyone that claims to get good QUALITY results out of it at that size. Whatever they're doing to shrink it will make it worse than an unsloth Q2XS quantization of it or equivalent. That size of model needs something like 150GB of RAM to run properly with full unquantized kv cache and not with a ton of training data discarded.
I remain exceedingly skeptical of people who are claiming to run fairly large models in ridiculously tiny sizes. For comparison a 'regular' version of v4 flash 0731 has file sizes more like this: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731-GGUF
Even the 97GB Q2XS will show very significant divergence from the full precision thing. Running a lobotomized model just to say you're doing it is really not accomplishing anything special.
It is 2 bit? anybody tested this? is any good?
yeah 2 bit quantization, so probably not that great for actual work