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Running Gemma-4 26B at 124 tokens/sec on a CPU, no GPU

Running Gemma-4 26B at 124 tokens/sec on a CPU, no GPU

Jun 30, 2026 AI & Machine Learning
cpu-inference llm local ai mixture of experts model compression

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Running Gemma-4 26B at 124 tokens/sec on a CPU, no GPU

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I wanted to know how fast a 26B mixture-of-experts model could run on a desktop CPU with no GPU. Got ~40 tok/s single-stream (lossless) and ~124 batched. The surprising part was the byte budget: for this model you compress the output head (32% of per-token bytes), not the experts (16%). The writeup has the bandwidth roofline and the dead-ends; the repo has the reproducible recipe. Happy to answer questions.Repo: https://github.com/arun-prasath2005/gemma4-cpu-moe

Comments (3)

Graciela Kuvalis Graciela Kuvalis 1 week ago

124 batched is wild. what quant level and which CPU?

Felton Kessler Felton Kessler 1 week ago

Which CPU and RAM config produced these numbers?

Rebekah Bayer Rebekah Bayer 4 days ago

124 tok/s on a cpu? what hardware specs?