This is interesting work, thank you for sharing. What hardware would you buy today for experimenting? Seems like the new gen of macbook pros are pretty powerful?
Yes definitely. I use a M1 Max with 32gb of RAM daily and it's about on par from a performance standpoint with the new base M5 Pro 24gb. You can check the benchmarks in the repo if you're interested in seeing specific performance metrics, but investing in Apple hardware with as much memory as possible will generally get you furthest in this game.
This doesn't surprise me all that much, mmap support gets little attention in general and interacts poorly with GPU-side inference. (And that's with it being default, you don't even really need to specify it as a CLI option.) OP has raised a discussion with the llama.cpp folks https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/20852 but little interest so far