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I reverse-engineered an NPU vendor's engine format (int8 weights stored as two nibble planes) to run GGUFs with no model conversion — now 1.5× faster than the vendor's own runtime

This story is from 2026-08-28. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

I've been running Qwen3-0.6B on the M5Stack LLM-8850 card (Axera AX8850 NPU, 24 TOPS, 8GB LPDDR4x) hosted by a Raspberry Pi 5 — as a llama.cpp backend. The problem: the vendor stack requires converting every model through their compiler, and their closed runtime gets 13.5–14.5 t/s. I wanted llama.c…

Read the full story at r/LocalLLaMA ↗

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  1. 2026-08-28 05:33 · r/LocalLLaMA
    I reverse-engineered an NPU vendor's engine format (int8 weights stored as two nibble planes) to run GGUFs with no model conversion — now 1.5× faster than the vendor's own runtime

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