Arm's Cortex A725 Ft. Dell's Pro Max with GB10

https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arms-cortex-a725-ft-dells-pro-max

61•pixelpoet•1w ago

Comments

crest•1w ago

I would love to see a comparison between the A725 and X925 cores.

geerlingguy•1w ago

Not quite in the same depth, but there are some more general benchmarks across all cores and latencies here: https://github.com/geerlingguy/sbc-reviews/issues/92

arjie•1w ago

Wow, this repo and the ai-benchmarks repo are the ones I wanted https://github.com/geerlingguy/ai-benchmarks/issues/34

Thank you for doing these. Earned a star and a watch from me on both! Minor sponsor donation as gratitude.

Would be sick to have an RSS feed for your data releases.

geerlingguy•1w ago

Will consider that at some point; a lot of the time is just spent getting the data, heh.

ksec•1w ago

Note to myself: Cortex X925 was originally called X5. The Current Generation X930 is now called C1-Ultra used in Mediatek 9500.

pinnochio•1w ago

Apologies for the tangent, but isn't this like saying "sliced tomato featuring BLT sandwich"?

trynumber9•1w ago

No. It's trying to analyze the CPU core but clarifies the device under test as that may have performance implications. There is cooling and possibly manufactured configured power limits.

pinnochio•1w ago

I get what they're doing. I've never seen that phrasing before.

cmrdporcupine•1w ago

This is awesome. I'm going to have to spend some time digging over this.

I got one of these GB10s, but the ASUS variety. So far fairly happy with it. Most days I don't remember I'm on ARM.

It's pretty performant, snappy, about the same speed as my other mini PC, a Ryzen 9 7940HS Minisforum UM 790 Pro, but with double the amount of cores and many times the amount of RAM.

storystarling•1w ago

Have you tried running any local LLMs via llama.cpp? I am curious if that high RAM is effectively usable as unified memory for larger models. I wonder if the memory bandwidth is sufficient to get decent performance on something like a 70b model or if it bottlenecks.

justaboutanyone•1w ago

You can run large-ish MoE model at good speeds, like gpt-oss-120b, it's snappy enough even with big context.

But large and dense at the same time is a bit slow.

Running a local LLM will be a load of money for something much slower than the api providers though.

storystarling•1w ago

Makes sense regarding the MoE performance. I am not sure the cost argument holds up for high volume workloads though. If you are running batch jobs 24/7 the hardware pays for itself in a few months compared to API opex. It really just comes down to utilization.

storystarling•1w ago

Do you have specific t/s numbers for those dense models? I'm curious just how severe the memory bandwidth bottleneck gets in practice.

I'm not sure I agree on the cost aspect though. For high-volume production workloads the API bills scale linearly and can get painful fast. If you can amortize the hardware over a year and keep the data local for privacy, the math often works out in favor of self-hosting.

justaboutanyone•1w ago

For Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct-Q5_K_M at 32k context, I fed it a 26k token file (truncated fiction novel) asking it to summarize, and it input processed at 224 tok/s and output generated at 3 tok/s. Not really good enough for interactive use without frustration. Not just from watching it reply, but also the long wait for it to actually read the book.

On the same hardware gpt-oss-120b at 128k context, I fed it a longer version of the input (a whole novel, 97k tok), and it input processed at 1650 tok/s and output generated at 27 tok/s. Just fast enough IMO

cmrdporcupine•1w ago

I bought it primarily so I could learn some of the toolchain for fine-tuning / training stuff, not so much for running inference, which its only "ok" at.

If I was primarily interested in that, I would have probably bought one of the cheaper Strix Halo machines.

It's also just a decent non-Mac ARM64 workstation, with large quantities of RAM. Which in 2026 is a bit of unicorn.

We Mourn Our Craft

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

The Waymo World Model

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

Selection Rather Than Prediction

72M Points of Interest

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Where did all the starships go?

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

We Mourn Our Craft

I Write Games in C (yes, C)

Hoot: Scheme on WebAssembly

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

Stories from 25 Years of Software Development

OpenCiv3: Open-source, cross-platform reimagining of Civilization III

U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession

The AI boom is causing shortages everywhere else

Al Lowe on model trains, funny deaths and working with Disney

The Waymo World Model

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions

Start all of your commands with a comma (2009)

Vocal Guide – belt sing without killing yourself

France's homegrown open source online office suite

Coding agents have replaced every framework I used

A Fresh Look at IBM 3270 Information Display System

Show HN: I saw this cool navigation reveal, so I made a simple HTML+CSS version

History and Timeline of the Proco Rat Pedal (2021)

Selection Rather Than Prediction

72M Points of Interest

Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production

Where did all the starships go?

Show HN: Look Ma, No Linux: Shell, App Installer, Vi, Cc on ESP32-S3 / BreezyBox

Learning from context is harder than we thought

Monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Show HN: Kappal – CLI to Run Docker Compose YML on Kubernetes for Local Dev

Hackers (1995) Animated Experience

Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes

Sheldon Brown's Bicycle Technical Info

Arm's Cortex A725 Ft. Dell's Pro Max with GB10

Comments