InferSSD on a 256 GB Mac Studio, Tested: Plain llama.cpp Wrote Three Times Faster

By Sofia Reyes WiCi’s open-source InferSSD engine, built to run AI models far larger than a computer’s memory, wrote answers at a third of the speed of the standard llama.cpp engine on a Mac Studio with 256 GB of memory, Novel Cognition found in an overnight test on 1-2 November 2026. Both engines ran the same DeepSeek V4.1 Flash model, about 748 billion parameters and a 473 GiB file, using InferSSD’s own benchmark script. llama.cpp wrote at 10.95 tokens a second; InferSSD’s best setting wrote at 3.45. InferSSD read the prompt as fast as llama.cpp or faster. The test follows Novel Cognition’s check of NetworkChuck’s WiCi One video, which was sponsored by WiCi. The full results, with charts, a red team of the result and the method, are at inferssd.novcog.us.com. What was checked, and what was not Both engines ran the same file, used the same six experts per token, built the model’s lookup tables into every token, ran without speculative decoding and received identical input token ids.

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