kimi-k3-in-c
A 2.78-trillion-parameter model. One CPU. 8 GB of RAM.
Kimi K3 inference in portable C99.
No BLAS. No framework. No GPU.
2.78T parameters |
1.56 TB checkpoint on disk |
8.24 GB peak RSS, measured |
176 KB the whole engine |
0 GPUs |
The same 2.78-trillion-parameter model, the same answer, on whatever machine you own.
More memory only buys speed:
| the machine you have |
RAM |
time per token |
what is going on |
| an ordinary laptop |
8 GB |
26.5 s |
the whole model streams off the disk on every step |
| a high-end laptop |
32 GB |
24.2 s |
some of the model now sits in memory |
| a desktop |
64 GB |
19.8 s |
more of it sits in memory |
| a heavy workstation |
128 GB+ |
5.6 s |
the model fits entirely in memory, the disk wait is gone |
Same short prompt at every size, and the output is byte-identical from the smallest machine to the largest; only the clock changes. One machine, 124 cores, fast NVMe drive: the first three rows still read the model from disk each step, so a slower drive is slower there, while the 128 GB+ row keeps everything in memory and no longer waits on the disk. On that same machine v1.0.0 made the math per token about 8× lighter, a follow-up question in a chat 3.9× faster, and long prompts about half as costly. (A token is roughly a short word-piece; the two runnable demos below are the original captures on a slower drive, so their clock reads a little higher.) Full data in docs/data/.
I am open to AI research roles and PhD positions. CV.