It’s not FUD. It is my actual, lived experience. FUD is false, which this is not.
I use both vLLM and llama-server. vLLM is very painful, even with the Spark community docker image. It is slow to start, it does not support 3-bit dynamic quants well, and it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to run well for each model I want to try out, which is made worse by the slow starts.
I’m glad you’ve had a better experience? I can only speak to the experiences that I have had repeatedly. For at least a month, people on the official Spark forum were claiming you just couldn’t run MiMo-V2.5 on a single Spark, because they refused to use anything other than vLLM, while I was doing it just fine on llama-server with 200k+ of context.
And llama-server is “worse” in what specific ways? I was specific with my comment. The usual complaint was the lack of MTP/Eagle3 support in llama-server, but that is solved now. Now the main difference is a minor hit to prompt processing speed, at most, if you’re using a single Spark.
Too many people on the Spark forum are closed minded to the idea that vLLM is not the solution to every problem.
llama-server also comes with a truly excellent built-in web chat interface these days, which includes the ability to connect to MCPs so the models can be used agentically through a conversational interface even from my phone. What does vLLM offer? Yeah… nothing. And options like Open WebUI seem really bloated.
For a cluster of multiple Sparks, the pain of vLLM is still worthwhile, as I already said before. Or if you’re running some kind of major production workload, I guess? Instead of a single user, few agent setup like most people.
Unsloth Studio is also very low effort, and a lot better than LM Studio in my opinion. (Performance, compatibility with Gemma 4, actually open source, etc.)
Compared to a dynamic quant like Unsloth's UD-Q4_K_XL, which keeps some important parameters in higher precision, a basic NVFP4 quant seems to do a lot more damage to the model unless it is carefully calibrated.
I would recommend using llama-server if you're just on a single Spark. You get access to dynamic quants like that more easily, the performance is not that different from vLLM most of the time these days, and it is much faster and easier to switch between models.
As far as intelligence goes, Qwen3.6-27B is much smarter than the 35B-A3B model, but that's also not the sort of thing to argue with an AI model about in the first place. Just open a new chat and try again.
Gemma-4-31B is not as good at agentic use cases as Qwen3.6-27B, but it is a fairly balanced model overall, and worth trying out too. Its MTP can nearly triple the performance of the model, where the benefits of MTP or Eagle seem more limited for Qwen3.6-27B in my testing, maybe doubling the speed.
> The systems but old but I’m seeing 11tks 27b, 15tks 35b MoE
If that's accurate, then you must be doing something wrong/weird. On a single RTX 3090, I'm seeing substantially higher performance. Dual GPU won't necessarily give a ton of performance improvement, but it shouldn't hurt performance.
With llama-bench, I just measured Qwen3.6-27B at 41 tok/s and Qwen3.6-35B-A3B at 153 tok/s on one RTX 3090. (Those results are without MTP. With MTP, I'm seeing about 65 to 70 tok/s for Qwen3.7-27B.)
I'm using the unsloth UD-Q4_K_XL quant. If you're using bf16 for some reason, that could explain the low performance and inability to have enough context despite having 48GB of VRAM, I guess, but... don't do that.
> For a MBP I have 48 GB of RAM M5 Pro. It runs at about 12-14 t/s at Q4
Are you running with MTP enabled? I have seen some people on M5 hardware report 20+ t/s on Qwen3.6-27B using MTP... and I think that was a regular M5, not even M5 Pro.
I agree it is probably the same size model. It's probably exactly built on top of 5.5, just with more training, or else they would have bumped the version number to 6.
EDIT: It's just not even worth arguing this point, so deleting my original, much longer comment. Abstract taxonomies can claim that Taalas is CIM, but this entirely and utterly misses the point, and misses what makes Taalas' approach special. If you told a room full of chip architects to go build "CIM for AI", they would not build a Taalas-like totally specialized chip, therefore it is not sufficient, and just muddies the conversation from my point of view. People have been doing "CIM" for decades and yet I've never seen anyone build a totally specialized chip at the scale of Taalas. And yes, you can (in theory) build an analog version of any computer, so of course you can build analog CIM, but "analog compute" is not inherently CIM, so conflating the two is just confusing.
CIM does not bake the weights into silicon. The level of optimization that you can do down to the last transistor when the weights are fixed is on an entirely different level than CIM where you still need general purpose ALUs all over the place.
> It's odd to me that I haven't heard anything about this approach since.
It has only been four months since they unveiled their first prototype. I don't understand your confusion. Chip development does not happen overnight...?
Their initial blog post laid out a roadmap, so theoretically they should have another thing to demonstrate this summer.
You would think they would support their own GPT-OSS model, but, not really anymore. I wish they would release a GPT-OSS 2, but this doesn't fill me with confidence.
Well, the reason is simple: over the past several months, it has become very difficult to use Codex with non-OpenAI models. They removed the old edit tool that didn't require OpenAI's free form tool calling (that no other LLM host supports), they are adding tools to every request of a type that break most LLM hosts unless you use a proxy to filter them out, they add a "developer" role to some messages which breaks some chat templates, etc.
If someone wanted to fork Codex and make a community-maintained version that supports third party models, that would be great, because I liked Codex better than OpenCode for the most part.
Maybe you've found workarounds. Maybe you're using an old version of Codex. Maybe you have your own soft fork. I don't know. But I used to be able to use Codex with self-hosted models, and I gave up on that about a month ago as they kept breaking that.
> I have come to consider Gemma 4 31b the best model I can self-host
I'm confused. Your own results show that Gemma 4 26B A4B and Qwen3.6-27B did better in these tests?
I really like Gemma 4 31B, especially with how exceptionally good its MTP drafter is, but it is absurdly weak at tool calling and instruction following in my testing, and its smaller siblings are even worse at this. If the system prompt says to do something, Gemma 4 31B will very often ignore that entirely. It will also make fewer tool calls than were needed to solve a problem, so then it fails. The Qwen3.6 series is much, much more reliable for carrying out instructions and doing agentic tasks in my testing, although they can get stuck in loops.
There is a lot of potential in the Gemma 4 series, but I think Google needs to release a Gemma 4.1 update to polish the rough edges. Unfortunately, if Gemma 3's lifecycle is any indication, Google won't release a true revision of the Gemma 4 models, even if they release a bunch of specialized research models based on Gemma 4 over the next year.
I tested this myself a few months ago, and confirmed that it was really happening.
LLMs don't know who they are unless the system prompt tells them, and as all of them are trained on model responses that exist on the web that end up being scraped, the weights may predict a certain incorrect response. LLMs have no ability to introspect, and do not know anything about themselves, so they will hallucinate in response to that question unless they are carefully trained on that exact, pointless question.
It's also annoying that OpenCode doesn't even try to support local LLMs properly.
Getting OpenCode to work is possible, but extremely manual and clunky to configure. I have written a script to automate converting my llama-server configs into an OpenCode config, and that helps, but it's not ideal.
I have seriously considered writing Yet Another Coding Harness in my free time. I have some ideas for what would make it nice.
Qwen3.6-27B supports a 1 million token context window.
Of course, you have to have the right hardware to be able to run with a context window like that, as it takes about 100GB of memory on my DGX Spark to do that with full f16 KV cache on the q4_k_xl model.
I use both vLLM and llama-server. vLLM is very painful, even with the Spark community docker image. It is slow to start, it does not support 3-bit dynamic quants well, and it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to run well for each model I want to try out, which is made worse by the slow starts.
I’m glad you’ve had a better experience? I can only speak to the experiences that I have had repeatedly. For at least a month, people on the official Spark forum were claiming you just couldn’t run MiMo-V2.5 on a single Spark, because they refused to use anything other than vLLM, while I was doing it just fine on llama-server with 200k+ of context.
And llama-server is “worse” in what specific ways? I was specific with my comment. The usual complaint was the lack of MTP/Eagle3 support in llama-server, but that is solved now. Now the main difference is a minor hit to prompt processing speed, at most, if you’re using a single Spark.
Too many people on the Spark forum are closed minded to the idea that vLLM is not the solution to every problem.
llama-server also comes with a truly excellent built-in web chat interface these days, which includes the ability to connect to MCPs so the models can be used agentically through a conversational interface even from my phone. What does vLLM offer? Yeah… nothing. And options like Open WebUI seem really bloated.
For a cluster of multiple Sparks, the pain of vLLM is still worthwhile, as I already said before. Or if you’re running some kind of major production workload, I guess? Instead of a single user, few agent setup like most people.