danielhanchen 25aa77a4e2 quantize: size the output buffer exactly instead of nelements * 4
The per-tensor output buffer was sized `nelements * 4`, described as an upper
bound. It is a very loose one: the output is at most 2 bytes per element
(f16/bf16) and usually well under 1.1 (q8_0 and below), so between 2x and 4x of
it is never touched. The exact size is already known here, since it is what the
quantization loop writes, what new_size sums to, and what the GGUF metadata is
asserted against a few lines later.

On a model whose largest tensor is a few GB none of this matters. On
Qwen3.8-Flash-Next it does: per_layer_token_embd is 51.2 G elements, so the
buffer was 205 GB where 54 GB is needed at q8_0 and 32 GB at q4_1.

Measured on that model, VmHWM of a live llama-quantize was 485 GB per process.
Three of them fit in 2 TB and five did not, which is what an OOM-killed quant
ladder looks like. This removes about 150 GB of that.

Byte-identical output, verified against the same binary built at the parent
commit: q4_K, q8_0, q5_K, q6_K and IQ4_XS, over BF16 and F32 sources, with and
without a PLE table present. Six cases, six matching md5s.
2026-08-26 13:41:50 +00:00
2026-08-26 13:40:35 +00:00
2026-06-12 15:53:26 +02:00
2026-02-02 08:38:55 +02:00
2026-08-23 20:55:56 +03:00

llama.cpp

llama

Quick start

A few options to get llama.cpp installed on your machine:

Once installed:

# Download and run a model directly from Hugging Face
llama cli -hf ggml-org/Qwen3.5-0.8B-GGUF

# Launch OpenAI-compatible API server
llama serve -hf ggml-org/Qwen3.5-0.8B-GGUF
VLM session with `llama cli` VLM session with llama cli Built-in web UI against `llama serve` running Qwen 3.6 Built-in web UI against llama serve

Description

The main goal of llama.cpp is to enable LLM (and VLM) inference with minimal setup and state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of hardware - locally and in the cloud.

  • Plain C/C++ implementation without any dependencies
  • Apple silicon is a first-class citizen - optimized via ARM NEON, Accelerate and Metal frameworks
  • AVX, AVX2, AVX512 and AMX support for x86 architectures
  • RVV, ZVFH, ZFH, ZICBOP and ZIHINTPAUSE support for RISC-V architectures
  • 1.5-bit, 2-bit, 3-bit, 4-bit, 5-bit, 6-bit, and 8-bit integer quantization for faster inference and reduced memory use
  • Custom CUDA kernels for running LLMs on NVIDIA GPUs (support for AMD GPUs via HIP and Moore Threads GPUs via MUSA)
  • Vulkan and SYCL backend support
  • CPU+GPU hybrid inference to partially accelerate models larger than the total VRAM capacity

The llama.cpp project is build on top of the ggml library.

Supported backends

Backend Target devices
BLAS All
BLIS All
CANN Ascend NPU
CUDA Nvidia GPU
HIP AMD GPU
Hexagon [In Progress] Snapdragon
IBM zDNN IBM Z & LinuxONE
MUSA Moore Threads GPU
Metal Apple Silicon
OpenCL Adreno GPU
OpenVINO [In Progress] Intel CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs
RPC All
SYCL Intel GPU
VirtGPU VirtGPU APIR
Vulkan GPU
WebGPU All
ZenDNN AMD CPU

Documentation

Tools

Development

Contributing

  • Contributors can open PRs
  • Collaborators will be invited based on contributions
  • Maintainers can push to branches in the llama.cpp repo and merge PRs into the master branch
  • Any help with managing issues, PRs and projects is very appreciated!
  • Read the CONTRIBUTING.md for more information

Acknowledgements

  • yhirose/cpp-httplib - Single-header HTTP server, used by llama-server - MIT license
  • nothings/stb - Single-header image format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • nlohmann/json - Single-header JSON library, used by various tools/examples - MIT License
  • mackron/miniaudio - Single-header audio format decoder, used by multimodal subsystem - Public domain
  • sheredom/subprocess.h - Single-header process launching solution for C and C++ - Public domain
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