docs: what the x4 pair can and cannot do — measured, not argued

The design we sketched (trunk + KV on the 3090, MoE experts on the iGPU) is not
expressible in mainline llama.cpp. Per-tensor cross-backend placement aborts in
the scheduler -- "pre-allocated tensor (blk.0.ffn_down_exps.weight) in a buffer
(Vulkan1) that cannot run the operation (NONE)" -- and both per-layer
cross-backend forms fail at load. CUDA + Vulkan cannot serve one model; the CPU
is the only fallback side that works, which is exactly why -ot exps=CPU runs.

What the same build does instead is the surprise: iGPU-only (Vulkan/RADV, PLE in
page cache) gives 32.64 tok/s shallow, 25.77 tok/s at 64k depth and 456.7 tok/s
prefill, with the 3090 idle at 0 %. That matches halogen's deployed ~25 tok/s --
but commits 116 of the host's 121 GiB against halogen's 95.4 held with 14.7
spare, so it is not deployable beside the co-tenants. Throughput parity, memory
bankruptcy: the fleet's two-endpoint split stands, now on evidence rather than
preference.

New page LLM/x4-pair-experiment.md carries the tensor inventory, the results
table, the two scheduler limits, reproduction commands, and the traps found on
the way. Both index pages also stop calling halogen retired -- the ik swap's
stale claims were still sitting in them.
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Frank committed 2026-09-16 17:40:37 -07:00
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@@ -92,6 +92,12 @@ frank-small, port 7771]
ISTA-DASLab/Qwen3.8-27B-GSQ-RCO IQ3_S on the RTX 3090, with the model's own
Multi-Token Prediction head for speculative decoding and the BF16 projector
for the fleet's image path
- [[x4-pair-experiment]] — MEASURED 2026-09-16: what mainline llama.cpp can and
cannot do with the 3090 + Strix Halo pair, over their only link (the 3090's
Gen4 x4). The tensor inventory that decides any split, the two scheduler
limits that kill a cross-backend one, and the finding that the iGPU alone
matches halogen's deployed decode rate while leaving the 3090 idle — at a
memory cost the co-tenants cannot pay
- [[frank-large-ik-uncensored]] — RETIRED 2026-09-16 (rollback target): the
ik_llama.cpp runbook (root systemd unit, 2026-09-15 → 09-16) serving
mradermacher/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-Uncensored-i1-Q4_K_M on the RTX 3090