Show HN: We made our own inference engine for Apple Silicon
186 points
15 days ago
| 20 comments
| github.com
| HN
We wrote our inference engine on Rust, it is faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases. Your feedback is very welcomed. Written from scratch with idea that you can add support of any kernel and platform.
TheMagicHorsey
15 days ago
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Amazing!

How was your experience using Rust on this project? I'm considering a project in an adjacent space and I'm trying to decide between Rust, C, and Zig. Rust seems a bit burdensome with its complexity compared to C and Zig. Reminds me of C++ in its complexity (although not as bad). I find it difficult to walk through and understand a complicated Rust repository. I don't have that problem with C and Zig for the most part.

But I'm wondering if I just need to invest more time in Rust. How was your learning curve with the language?

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adastra22
15 days ago
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You are confusing familiarity with intrinsic complexity. I have 20 years experience with C/C++ before switching to rust a few years ago. After the initial hurdle, it is way easier and very simple to follow.
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TheMagicHorsey
12 days ago
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Are you generally able to quickly understand what is going on in somebody else's codebase written in Rust? I find it quite difficult to understand other people's Rust code. Is this just a familiarity thing? I have not written anything particularly huge or complex in Rust, but I have written a few CLI utilities. With an equivalent level of Go exposure, I find it much easier to understand code written in Go, compared to code written in Rust.

I'm quite proficient in C/C++ (started coding in C/C++ in 1997) but I still have a much harder time understanding a new C++ project compared to a C project.

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giancarlostoro
15 days ago
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Hoping the author can answer, I'm still learning about how this all works. My understanding is that inference is "using the model" so to speak. How is this faster than established inference engines specifically on Mac? Are models generic enough that if you build e.g. an inference engine focused on AMD GPUs or even Intel GPUs, would they achieve reasonable performance? I always assumed because Nvidia is king of AI that you had to suck it up, or is it just that most inference engines being used are married to Nvidia?

I would love to understand how universal these models can become.

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darkolorin
14 days ago
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Basically “faster” means better performance e.g. tokens/s without loosing quality (benchmarks scores for models). So when we say faster we provide more tokens per second than llama cpp. That means we effectively utilize hardware API available (for example we wrote our own kernels) to perform better.
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zackangelo
14 days ago
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We also wrote our inference engine in rust for mixlayer, happy to answer any questions from those trying to do the same.

Looks like this uses ndarray and mpsgraph (which I did not know about!), we opted to use candle instead.

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nodesocket
15 days ago
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I just spun up a AWS EC2 g6.xlarge instance to do some llm work. The GPU is NVIDIA L4 24GB and costs $0.8048/per hour. Starting to think about switching to an Apple mac2-m2.metal instance for $0.878/ per hour. Big question is the Mac instance only has 24GB of unified memory.
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khurs
14 days ago
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Unified memory doesn't compare to a Nvidia GPU, the latter is much better.

Just depends on what performance level you need.

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homarp
15 days ago
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Can you explain the type of quantization you support?

would https://docs.unsloth.ai/basics/kimi-k2-how-to-run-locally be faster with mirai?

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AlekseiSavin
15 days ago
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right now, we support AWQ but are currently working on various quantization methods in https://github.com/trymirai/lalamo
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khurs
14 days ago
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Have you added it to HomeBrew and other package managers yet?

Also any app deployed to PROD but developed on Mac need to be consistent i.e. work on Linux/in container.

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woadwarrior01
14 days ago
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floam
15 days ago
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How does this compare to https://github.com/Anemll/Anemll?
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smpanaro
15 days ago
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In practice, how often do the models use the ANE? It sounds like you are optimizing for speed which in my experience always favors GPU.
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AlekseiSavin
15 days ago
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You're right, modern edge devices are powerful enough to run small models, so the real bottleneck for a forward pass is usually memory bandwidth, which defines the upper theoretical limit for inference speed. Right now, we've figured out how to run computations in a granular way on specific processing units, but we expect the real benefits to come later when we add support for VLMs and advanced speculative decoding, where you process more than one token at a time
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J_Shelby_J
15 days ago
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VLMs = very large models?
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mmorse1217
15 days ago
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Probably vision language models.
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ewuhic
15 days ago
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>faster than llama cpp in all of the use cases

What's your deliberate, well-thought roadmap for achieving adoption similar to llama cpp?

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pants2
15 days ago
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Probably getting acquired by Apple :)
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khurs
14 days ago
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Ollama is the leader isn't it?

Brew stats (downloads last 30 days)

Ollama - 28,232 Lama.cpp - 7,826

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DiabloD3
14 days ago
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Ollama isn't an inference engine, its a GUI slapped onto a perpetually out-of-date vendored copy of Llama.cpp underneath.

So, if you're trying to actually count LLama.cpp downloads, you'd combine those two. Also, I imagine most users on OSX aren't using Homebrew, they're getting it directly from the GH releases, so you'd also have to count those.

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imtringued
14 days ago
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Actually, ollama has stopped using llama.cpp and is using ggml directly nowadays.
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greggh
15 days ago
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"trymirai", every time I hear the word Mirai I think of the large IOT DDoS botnet. Maybe it's just me though.
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fnord77
15 days ago
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I think of the goofy Toyota fuel cell car. I think a grand total of about 6 have been sold (leased) in california
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zdw
15 days ago
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How does this bench compared to MLX?
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jasonjmcghee
15 days ago
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I use MLX in lmstudio and it doesn't have whatever issues llama cpp is showing here.

Qwen3-0.6B at 5 t/s doesn't make any sense. Something is clearly wrong for that specific model.

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rnxrx
15 days ago
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I'm curious about why the performance gains mentioned were so substantial for Qwen vs Llama?
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AlekseiSavin
15 days ago
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it looks like llama.cpp has some performance issues with bf16
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sharifulin
15 days ago
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Wow! Sounds super interesting
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skybrian
15 days ago
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What are the units on the benchmark results? I’m guessing higher is better?
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AlekseiSavin
15 days ago
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yeah, tokens per second
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dcreater
15 days ago
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Somewhat faster on small models. Requires new format.

Not sure what the goal is for this project? Not seeing how this presents adequate benefits to get adopted by the community

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worldsavior
15 days ago
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It's utilizing Apple ANE and probably other optimization tools provided by Apple's framework. Not sure if llama.cpp uses them, but if they're not then the benchmark on GitHub says it all.
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koakuma-chan
15 days ago
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Written in Rust is a big one for me.
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mintflow
15 days ago
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just curios, will it be supported on iOS, it would be great to build local llm app with this project.
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AlekseiSavin
15 days ago
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slavasmirnov
15 days ago
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that’s exactly we are looking for not to waste on apis. Wonder how significant trade offs are
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iglushenkov
14 days ago
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cooollll
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ednevsky
15 days ago
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nice
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cwlcwlcwlingg
15 days ago
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Wondering why use Rust other than C++
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adastra22
15 days ago
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Why use C++?
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khurs
14 days ago
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So C++ users don't need to learn something new.
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khurs
14 days ago
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The recommendation from the security agencies is to prefer Rust over C++ as less risk of exploits.

Checked and Lama.cpp used C++ (obviously) and Llama uses Go.

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bee_rider
15 days ago
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I wonder why they didn’t use Fortran.
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outworlder
15 days ago
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Why use C++ for greenfield projects?
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giancarlostoro
15 days ago
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...or D? or Go? or Java? C#? Zig? etc they chose what they were most comfortable with. Rust is fine, it's not for everyone clearly, but those who use it produce high quality software, I would argue similar with Go, without all the unnecessary mental overhead of C or C++
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