"Frontier models need a datacenter GPU" rests on a hidden assumption: that the model reads ALL its parameters every token. Decode is memory-bandwidth bound — sweep 34B params/token and an 8 GB card dies at 1–2 tok/s.
So we ran ONE 34.7B reasoning model — Ourbox-35B-JGOS, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts — as the identical weights across the whole hardware spectrum. All measured:
Why it works: Ourbox holds 34.7B params but only ~3B are active per token (256 experts, top-8). Since decode is bandwidth-bound, a dense 34B moves ~16.7 GB/token while Ourbox moves ~1.45 GB — ~11× less traffic. Put the experts in system RAM, keep attention/router/shared on the GPU, and a 34.7B reasoner runs on an 8 GB laptop — or no GPU at all.
Sparsity alone, proven (same laptop, same quant, ~same footprint): Ourbox-35B (A3B) 20.01 tok/s vs Qwen2.5-32B (dense) 5.36 → 3.7× from sparsity alone, ~2× the best dense-32B on any 8 GB machine. Not a toy: GPQA Diamond 86.4% (maj@8).
Try it live (same prompt, GPU vs GPU-less CPU, live tok/s). Honest scope: one machine's measurements; the CPU path proves it RUNS without a GPU, not that it beats one.