This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/a-30b-model-crawled-on-my-mini-pc-but-the-weights-were-innocent.
GLM-4.7-Flash is a 30B model with 3B active params, so why did it crawl on my mini PC? Not the weights, not the quant. The attention design, and the runtime.
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GLM-4.7-Flash should fly on a small box: 30B total, ~3B active. On a Radeon 780M mini PC it crawled and fell apart past short context. The cause was not the weights or the quant. It was Multi-head Latent Attention with no runtime that implemented it, so the model fell back to plain attention and the KV cache ballooned ~17x. Swapping to ik_llama.cpp with a real MLA path fixed it.