Four changes, each measured on a Xeon 8480C with Spark-X2.5-1.7B at 24
threads. Numbers are best-of-interleaved-passes; this host is shared and a
single sequential grid swung the llama.cpp control 30%, so anything under
~8% is not treated as a result.
**vLLM's CPU backend does have a 4-bit kernel.** An earlier note in this
tree said it did not, on the strength of `woq_int4_linear`,
`int4_scaled_mm_with_quant` and `da8w4_linear` all being absent. Those are
simply not the names it uses: `CPUWNA16LinearKernel` dispatches GPTQ/AWQ
checkpoints to `int4_scaled_mm_cpu`, an AMX W4A8 GEMM, whenever activations
are bf16 and the checkpoint carries no act-order. Four-bit weights times
eight-bit activations is the arithmetic llama.cpp's Q4_K_M already does.
`gptq_cpu_export` builds checkpoints for it; the kernel pins the zero point
at 8, so the grid must be symmetric, and a per-group scale search recovers
most of what that costs.
**A per-device weight path** (`edge/weight_path.py`). The fast kernel on each
device needs a different, mutually exclusive weight layout, so the choice has
to come from a probe rather than a flag: AMX x86 -> W4A8/GPTQ; x86 without
AMX, or priority="fidelity" -> W4A16/tinygemm (bf16 activations, the more
faithful of the two); ARM -> W4A16 but flagged unverified, because PyTorch's
4-bit CPU GEMM dispatches a different kernel there than the AVX-512 one
measured here; phone -> runs_in_vllm=False, the deliverable is an exported
graph with calibrated w8a16.
**The CPU compile cache never loaded.** `_try_load_aot_compiled_fn` finishes
with `compiled_fn.finalize_loading(cfg)`, which the CUDA wrapper object has
and the inductor CPU backend's plain function does not. The AttributeError
was swallowed as a cache miss, so every engine start recompiled the model:
warm start 49.8 s against 14.9 s with the missing no-op attached. Self-
disabling if upstream gives the CPU path a real one.
**The head gate stops being a GEMM.** A 2048x8 projection cannot amortize a
thread fan-out: dispatched as `aten::mm` it costs 1.155 ms of a decode step,
nearly all barrier. As an eager reduction behind an opaque op it costs 0.444
ms. It has to be opaque -- written inline the reduction is traced, and
inductor's loop made the whole step 1.8x slower (78.8 -> 44.5 tok/s).
Also included and *off by default*: `cpu_ir_ops` registers the fused
`_C::rms_norm` / `_C::fused_add_rms_norm` kernels that vLLM's CPU build ships
but gates on `GPGPU_DEVICE`. In isolation they are 3.6x and 4.5x faster than
the native path; end to end they are slightly slower (72.7 vs 74.0 tok/s),
because inductor was already fusing the native norm into its neighbours and
an opaque call breaks that fusion. Kept with the measurement recorded so the
next person does not repeat it. `gelu_and_mul` is deliberately not registered:
its fused CPU kernel is 2.7x slower at Spark's GEGLU shape.
Decode, W4A16 g64 -> W4A8 g128 with the gate fix: 69.1 -> 84.5 tok/s (+22%),
against llama.cpp Q4_K_M's 90.0; prefill 3347 against 1121 (3.0x). The two
4-bit paths are not equally faithful: against each build's own bf16 over 12
greedy prompts, Q4_K_M reproduces 4/12, W4A16 2/12 and W4A8 1/12.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Single-stream CPU decode reads every weight to emit one token, so bits per
weight set the token rate. This registers a W4A16 group-wise method
out-of-tree through register_quantization_config -- vLLM itself is untouched
-- using PyTorch's _weight_int4pack_mm_for_cpu tinygemm kernel.
Two paths over one set of weights, because that kernel dequantizes once per
row of activations and so is linear in the batch (12.9x slower than bf16 at
512 rows). Single-row steps take tinygemm; wider batches unpack the weight to
bf16 once and use the ordinary oneDNN/AMX GEMM. Shipping only the first
measured pp512 = 557 tok/s against bf16's 4455; with both, 3589.
The batch threshold is 2 rather than the ~8 rows where the unpack path starts
winning on speed, because running tinygemm on a multi-row batch and then
vLLM's cpu_attention_with_kv_cache in the same forward dies with SIGILL
inside the attention kernel -- an AMX instruction with no valid tile config
loaded. The same prompt is fine in bf16 and fine once every multi-row GEMM
takes the unpack path.
Positioning, measured on a Xeon 8480C with 32 pinned cores and a warm cache
(analysis/spark_cpu_int4.md): vLLM's own GPTQ W4A8 AMX path is faster --
88.7 tok/s decode and 4355 prefill against 85.5 and 3589 here -- but its
config rejects sym=False at 4 bits, so it can only be fed a symmetric grid.
This one is asymmetric and costs +12.5% perplexity against that path's
+27.2%, and needs no AMX. llama.cpp Q4_K_M, for reference, is 98.0 tok/s
decode and 1356 prefill at +7.6% and 5.15 bits per weight.
Expanding a quantized checkpoint back to bf16 offline and scoring it
reproduces the quantized run to within 0.2% perplexity, so both GEMM paths,
the nibble packing and the quantized tied embedding are faithful.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GXhbAfkSNRaeqZrus5Z2fx
Spark-X2.5-1.7B is an Apache-2.0 on-device model built for agentic tool
use. vLLM 0.28 has no implementation for it, so it could not be served at
all; llama.cpp already ships one, which made it the only edge engine able
to run the model.
Three traits separate it from a Llama-style decoder:
* Hybrid attention -- layer_types interleaves three 512-token sliding
layers with one full-attention layer, which is what makes the 1M-token
context affordable on a phone.
* Per-layer-type RoPE -- sliding layers rotate all 256 head dims with
theta 1e4, full layers only the first quarter with theta 5e6.
* A head-wise attention output gate -- g_proj reads the same post-norm
input as QKV and scales each head's attention output by a sigmoid.
The checkpoint also stores QKV pre-fused as a single q_k_v_proj, so
load_weights splits it before vLLM's sharded QKVParallelLinear sees it.
Verified against the official remote-code implementation on transformers
4.57.1 (the version config.json targets; it does not import on the 5.x in
our venvs). In fp32 all three scenarios match exactly -- 32/32 greedy
tokens with a max top-20 logprob difference of 2.2e-05. In bf16 the short
and the 2465-token long-context prompts still match 32/32, which is what
exercises the sliding layers; the tool-calling prompt diverges at token 23
on a near-tie, and fp32 confirms that is rounding rather than a defect.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01L1ax5wYLA6XbqEL1i8L9gZ
* vllm_omni/deploy/edge/qwen3_tts.yaml: single-device Qwen3-TTS profile with a
ramped codec chunk schedule (2->4->8->16->25 frames) that removes the ~80 ms
playback stall of the default 1->25 schedule, decode batch 1, max_num_seqs 4.
* deploy_profile="edge" (Omni/AsyncOmni kwarg, --deploy-profile CLI, headless
serve) resolves vllm_omni/deploy/<profile>/<model_type>.yaml; mutually
exclusive with deploy_config; explicit profiles never fall back silently.
* tests/helpers/stage_config.py: modify_stage_config anchors a relative
base_config before writing the temp YAML so overlay-derived configs resolve.
* async_omni_engine.py also carries the init-timeline hooks used by WP2.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
