Someone got an LLM running on a Commodore 64 from 1982, and it runs as well
18 comments
·May 18, 2025oac
aaronharnly
And also not exactly a Commodore 64 is it, since it requires an addon with 30x the RAM. Still very cool and impressive though!
actionfromafar
It's a borderline thing. The official Commodore REU only supported 8x the RAM. But you could modify it yourself to 32x. Creative Micro Design also had the third party 1750 REU which supported 32x RAM. (2 megabytes.)
So it is somewhat period accurate, albeit very expensive at the time.
robertlagrant
Imagine if someone had run that LLM on that hardware in the 1980s, though. Incredible!
(Probably couldn't have trained the model, but still.)
blkhawk
If anyone wants to try it with an esp32:
https://github.com/DaveBben/esp32-llm
needs a board with PSRAM but they are surprisingly plenty these days - almost standard. I tried it a few months back.
JPLeRouzic
Here is the repo:
Leynos
0.002 tokens per second
JPLeRouzic
Given that it uses a CPU that is one millionth slower than a modern CPU, its performance is impressive.
Quarrel
I've read the criticisms here, but well, as someone whose first computer was a C64, this is cool as hell.
Like, what?!
On an 8-bit, 64Kb, ~1MHz CPU!
Amazing.
Sure, there are too many caveats, but this isn't really about making this a viable modern alternative.
It's just about, well, being very cool? Nostalgic!
And in that, I think it succeeds.
vardump
Not 64 kelvinbits, but 2 megabytes of RAM.
Or should I say 2 mebibytes. </pedantic>
Quarrel
fairy nuff. Not 64Kb, but 64 kilobytes of RAM, + 20 kilobytes of ROM!
Plus, we had a 320x200 display in a glorious 16 colours!
Revolutionary sprites, too!!
FWIW, my first game, ie all I cared about on a C64 at the time, was the amazing Revenge of the Mutant Camels!
ben_w
> Revenge of the Mutant Camels
The most Jeff Minter name of all Jeff Minter's games.
vardump
You forgot that 2 MB REU (RAM expansion unit).
johann8384
Imagine where we would be today if this was where we were on the C64 in 1982. If we had the concept and ability to create these models and run them on machines and how much that would have evolved by now.
Amazing.
AndrewOMartin
We did. People have been doing impressive AI demonstrations before they're was hardware to run it. E.g. Turing implemented a chess playing program, but had to have his colleage execute it manually to play a game.
null
It runs a model with 260K params, so hardly a "Large" LM. Nevertheless, a cool project.