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Comment by tgrowazay

9 hours ago

LLM speed is roughly <memory_bandwidth> / <model_size> tok/s.

DDR4 tops out about 27Gbs

DDR5 can do around 40Gbs

So for 70B model at 8 bit quant, you will get around 0.3-0.5 tokens per second using RAM alone.

Channels matter a lot, quad channel ddr4 is going to beat ddr5 in dual channel most of the time.

  • Four channels of DDR4-3200 vs two channels of DDR5-6400 (four subchannels) should come out pretty close. I don't see any reason why the DDR4 configuration would be consistently faster; you might have more bank groups on DDR4, but I'm not sure that would outweigh other factors like the topology and bandwidth of the interconnects between the memory controller and the CPU cores.

DRAM speeds is one thing, but you should also account for the data rate of the PCIe bus (and/or VRAM speed). But yes, holding it "lukewarm" in DRAM rather than on NVMe storage is obviously faster.