this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I use Virtual Machines and run local LLMs. LLMs need VRAM rather than CPU RAM. You shouldn't be doing it on a laptop without a serious NPU or GPU, if at all. I don't know if I will be using VMs heavily on this machine or not, but that would be a good reason to have more RAM. Even so 32 GiB should be enough for a few VMs running concurrently.

[–] Mistic@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

That's fair. I've put it there as more of a possible use case rather than something you should be consistently doing.

Although iGPU can perform quite well when given a lot of RAM, afaik.

[–] tal@lemmy.today 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

and run local LLMs.

Honestly, I think that for many people, if they're using a laptop or phone, doing LLM stuff remotely makes way more sense. It's just too power-intensive to do a lot of that on battery. That doesn't mean not-controlling the hardware -- I keep a machine with a beefy GPU connected to the network, can use it remotely. But something like Stable Diffusion normally requires only pretty limited bandwidth to use remotely.

If people really need to do a bunch of local LLM work, like they have a hefty source of power but lack connectivity, or maybe they're running some kind of software that needs to move a lot of data back and forth to the LLM hardware, I think I might consider lugging around a small headless LLM box with a beefy GPU and a laptop, plug the LLM box into the laptop via Ethernet or whatnot, and do the LLM stuff on the headless box. Laptops are just not a fantastic form factor for heavy crunching; they've got limited ability to dissipate heat and tight space constraints to work with.

[–] areyouevenreal@lemm.ee 1 points 2 months ago

Yeah it is easier to do it on a desktop or over a network. That's what I was trying to imply. Although having an NPU can help. Regardless I would rather be using my own server than something like ChatGPT.