Running Modern SLMs (Gemma 4, Qwen 3 & Phi-4) on CPU: Pure Rust, Zero Python

This story is from 2026-10-25. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

Beyond Python: Benchmarking Modern SLMs (Gemma 4, Qwen 3 & Phi-4) on CPU with Pure Rust & Candle When I first shared my experiment on running Microsoft’s Phi-3 on a standard consumer CPU using pure Rust and Hugging Face’s Candle framework, the mission was straightforward: prove that we don’t need b…