Every device around you is more capable than it looks. TV boxes, old phones, single-board computers and routers all ship with CPUs, RAM and flash that sit idle most of the day. smolmaxxing is about unlocking that capability: finding the biggest language model each device can really run, then pushing it further with custom kernels, smarter memory use and weight streaming. Every claim is measured on the hardware itself.
Device #2 is a first-generation iPad Air (2013): Apple A7, 2 cores, NEON without dotprod, 1 GB of RAM, iOS 12.5.7, jailbroken, CPU only. A 13-year-old tablet runs a 1.7B-parameter model at 24-26 tok/s (18-22 in long chats), a 4B one at about 10 tok/s, an 8B mixture of experts at about 3.5 tok/s (5 with half its experts, at a quality cost), and a 16B one at 2.6-4.5 tok/s, with their experts paged from flash, from a chat page in its own Safari. See Results on device #2.
