Two £300 Snapdragon mini PCs, no GPU: 46 tok/s local Qwen3.8 Flash Next with custom ToRc engine

WorldlyAd7946 · reddit · 2026-10-22

A r/LocalLLaMA user chained two £300 Lenovo IdeaCentre Mini PCs (Snapdragon X, 32GB) over USB4 and ran large quantized models with no GPU:

Engines: started on llama.cpp, contributed ARM NEON kernels and a Windows-on-ARM build to Janas, then wrote a custom engine "ToRc" (unreleased) used for these tests.
Benchmarks (prose, read/write): ToRc on one box hits 228/43.4 tok/s, 49.5 tok/s with MTP, vs llama.cpp's 133.8/25.8.
Models: Qwen3.6 35B A3B (Q40, 19.4GB with MTP head) and Qwen3.8 Flash Next (IQ4NL 95GB / UD-Q4KXL 104GB).
Coding test: an ISO 8601 duration parser task passed self-written tests and 6 reference checks across engines.

The setup shows a budget ARM CPU+NPU inference path: £600 of hardware streaming 100GB-class GGUF models from NVMe.

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