Field notes on software, firmware & the machines we build
Bytecairn is a workshop notebook in public: tutorials, teardowns, and hard-won tips across software and the hardware it runs on.
Featured
Consumer GPUs are bandwidth-bound, not precision-bound. Here’s the exact VRAM-to-quant lookup table that maximizes tokens/sec without crossing the perceptible quality threshold.
AI
Stop comparing local LLM engines on tokens per second. Pick the one that matches your actual bottleneck: setup friction, KV-cache scheduling, or memory bandwidth.
AI
NVIDIA's RTX Spark packs 128GB of unified memory, but ~300 GB/s bandwidth caps inference throughput—here's the math on what you can actually run locally versus the cloud.
Firmware
A careful, repeatable workflow for replacing stock firmware — with a recovery path for every step.
AI
Stop thinking of the context window as memory. Think of it as a desk — finite, and everything competes for space.