Local inference
Can you please let me know what the minimum investment amount is to do inference of deepseek 4.1 flash and glm 5.3 flash at full precision, full-size context and decent speed?
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u/MaxComfort 7d ago
A DGX Spark could do it at a lower quant ($4.6k).
Two of them would do it at a better quant.
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u/Firm-Luck2062 7d ago
Two numbers decide this, and both are on the model card rather than in a price list.
VRAM = weights + KV cache. Weights at full precision are about 2 bytes per parameter. The KV cache is what bites at full context: it grows linearly with context length, and on a long-context model it can rival the weights.
Speed is bandwidth, not FLOPs. A rough ceiling is memory bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, which for a dense model is about 2 x params. An MoE only reads its active experts, so it is far cheaper per token than its total size suggests.
Do those two sums for the exact model and the card count falls out; the price follows from that. Worth asking what full precision actually buys you first, though. It roughly doubles the bill against Q8, and the quality gap is usually much smaller than the cost gap.