🦙 LLMs on AIX: technical experimentation beyond the GPU hype
At LibrePower, we have published Llama-AIX: a proof-of-concept for running lightweight LLM inference directly on AIX , using only CPU and memory—no GPUs involved.
It’s worth clarifying from the start: this is technical fun and experimentation. It is not a product, not a commercial promise, and not an alternative to large GPU-accelerated AI platforms.
That said, there is a sound technical foundation behind this experiment.
Not all LLM use cases are GPU-bound.
In many common business scenarios in Power environments:
- RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
- Questions about internal documentation
- On-prem technical assistants
- Semantic search on own knowledge
- Text analytics with strong dependence on latency and proximity to data
the bottleneck is not always the massive calculation, but:
- CPU
- Memory width
- Data access latency
- Data localization
In these cases, small and well bounded inferences can be reasonably executed without GPUs, especially when the model is not the center of the system, but just another piece.
⚙️ CPU, MMA and low-power accelerators
The natural evolution does not only involve GPUs:
- Increasingly vectorized CPUs
- Extensions as MMA
- Specific and low-power accelerators (such as the future Spyre)
- Closer integration to the operating system and data stack
This type of acceleration is especially relevant in Power architectures, where the design prioritizes sustained throughput, consistency and reliability, not just FLOPS peaks.
🧩 Why AIX?
Running this on AIX is not a necessity, it is a conscious choice to:
- Understanding the real limits
- Explore its technical feasibility
- Dismantling simplistic assumptions
- Learning how LLMs fit into existing Power systems
Many Power customers operate stable, amortized and critical infrastructures, where moving data to the cloud or introducing GPUs is not always desirable or feasible.
🔍 What Llama-AIX is (and isn’t)
- ✔ A technical PoC
- ✔ An honest exploration
- ✔ An engineering exercise
- ✔ Open source
- ✖ Not a benchmark
- ✖ Not a complete AI platform
- ✖ Not intended to compete with GPU solutions
- ✖ Not “AI marketing”.
The idea is simple: look beyond the hype, understand the nuances and assess where LLMs bring real value in Power and AIX environments.
Purely out of technical curiosity.
And because experimenting is still a fundamental part of engineering.
💬 In what specific use case would an on-prem LLM in Power make sense to you?
#LibrePower #AIX #IBMPower #LLM #RAG #OpenSource #EnterpriseArchitecture #AIOnPrem
