Ai hardware

A buying guide for running coding agents on your own hardware. Why prompt caching makes generation speed the number that matters, where a cold cache costs you minutes instead, a comparison table of Mac Studio M5 Ultra, RTX 5090, Radeon AI PRO R9700, Strix Halo and DGX Spark with September 2026 prices, and the memory every open-weight coding model actually needs.

Apple's M5 Ultra Mac Studio tops out at 512GB of unified memory at 1.2TB/s. Here is the memory math, which large open-weight LLMs actually fit, measured tokens per second, and three ways to run a model bigger than 4-bit allows: Unsloth GGUF quants, streaming weights off SSD, or a Thunderbolt 5 cluster.

OpenAI and Broadcom unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI's first custom ASIC targeting 50% cheaper inference than Nvidia GPUs. Here's what the chip is, how it compares, and what it means for API costs and the broader silicon war.

A practical hardware guide for self-hosting LLMs in 2026. Compare consumer GPUs, Apple Silicon, enterprise cards, and pre-built AI workstations. Find the right setup for 7B to 405B models at every budget.