StudioRunning 35B MoE models on a Tesla K80 (2014) at ~21 tok/s, in plain C
A developer has released Pantheon, a pure C inference engine with no external dependencies, and the Foundry ML library. Featuring a CUDA backend optimized for Kepler architecture, it can run 35B Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models on affordable used Tesla K80 GPUs from 2014. On dual-K80 setups paired with 2-core, 8 GB hosts lacking AVX support, decoding speeds reach approximately 21 tokens per second for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Nex-N2-mini (Q3_K_M), while prompt processing handles up to 8k tokens at 110–120 tok/s. Since weights reside on the GPU, an 8 GB host suffices. The engine includes prefix caching, reducing the second round of a 14k-token system prompt from 170 seconds to just 9 seconds. However, prefill performance remains a bottleneck, requiring several minutes to process a single 30k-tok…
An original pure C inference engine that provides real-world speed benchmarks for running 35B MoE models on older K80 hardware, along with deployment commands and clear performance limitations, allowing for independent reproduction.
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