It won't be fast at all, for certain, but it'll have enough memory to prove a configuration and be able to really use gargantuan GGUF format LLMs in the latest compiled llama-server. Re: electricity, I pay the equivalent of $0.07 ro $0.09 USD per kWh so it's not an extreme burden to have a theoretical 500W server running. Something like $35 to $50 of electricity a month if it's 500W 24x7.
So for optimal speed the models must be quantized in this format.
It is very likely that with INT8 models those CPUs are fast enough so that the inference throughput is limited by the memory bandwidth (384-bit interface to DDR4-2933 per socket, i.e. 282 GB/s for both sockets).
The memory throughput for such an old server is very similar to an AMD Ryzen Strix Halo, NVIDIA DGX Spark or Apple M5 Pro, but it has much more memory.
The inference speed should be very similar to those, but with bigger LLMs.
Or people who want or need to run an uncensored (abliterated) gguf file to deal with controversial topics that a paid LLM service will refuse to work with or ban you for.
The largest high performance compute ec2 offering, the c9g.metal-48xl , maxes out at 384GB RAM and already costs a shitload.
The m9gd.48xlarge and m9gd.metal-48xl both have 768GB RAM and I cringe to think what they cost monthly. I just did the math on one of these and it costs $12 per hour, or $289 a day, or $8900+ for one month.
Also plenty of Europeans or people from other locations may consider it as an unacceptable risk factor to put their "off site" self hosted AI stuff with an American controlled company. Particularly if the servers are physically in the USA.
Yes, it's a boatload of cash, but that's a €13,000 GPU and €20,000 of RAM at present prices. There is a segment of businesses where a fixed €28k/year bill is going to be preferred over plonking down €40k for a (theoretically) depreciating asset and ongoing colocation costs.
And yet basically all AWS customers are doing exactly that. Turns out that making CAPEX "someone else's problem" is worth quite a lot to many businesses
can we trust any US based service to guarantee privacy and confidentiality? especially to us european frienemies?
Insert your dedicated hosting provider of choice for 'AWS' (somewhere like Hetzner will be cheaper anyway).
But in general, AWS hosts are yours, running your code, with your security policies enforced. Sure, the US government can silently subpoena the contents thereof, but aside from that fairly extreme case, it's not like AWS is handing your data over to 3rd parties.