Hi HN,

I’m Padam, a developer based in Dubai.

Over the last 2 years I’ve been experimenting with the idea that AI inference might not require GPUs.

Modern LLM inference is often memory-bound rather than compute-bound, so I built an experimental system that virtualizes GPU-style parallelism from CPU cores using SIMD vectorization and quantization.

The result is AlifZetta — a prototype AI-native OS that runs inference without GPU hardware.

Some details:

• ~67k lines of Rust • kernel-level SIMD scheduling • INT4 quantization • sparse attention acceleration • speculative decoding • 6 AI models (text, code, medical, image,research,local)

Goal: make AI infrastructure cheaper and accessible where GPUs are expensive.

beta link is here: https://ask.axz.si

Curious what HN thinks about this approach.