# Anyone going to repurpose a bc250 crypto GPU for local AI

> Source: <https://forum.level1techs.com/t/anyone-going-to-repurpose-a-bc250-crypto-gpu-for-local-ai/255207#post_1>
> Published: 2026-09-06 21:56:27+00:00

**TL;DR:** The GFX1013 die physically has 40 Compute Units; the factory firmware masks 16 of them. A community kernel patch by S. Duggan re-enables the remaining CUs. After an independent FP32 sanity check (100M error-free multiply-adds), a controlled paired A/B re-run on 11 models followed. Key results at 4K context, llama.cpp b9265, verified-stock 24 CU → patched 40 CU:

- **Median generation speed-up: 1.32×** (all 11 deltas positive, p < 0.01)
- **Median prefill speed-up: 1.50×** (prefill gains more because it’s more compute-bound)
- **Granite 4.0-H Tiny (hybrid Mamba): 104 → 129 tok/s** (+24%)
- **GPT-OSS 20B MXFP4: 66 → 87.5 tok/s** (+32%)
- **Qwen3.5 35B-A3B MoE: 59.5 → 78.7 tok/s** (+32%)
- **QwQ-32B IQ2_M (reasoning dense): 9.6 → 14.9 tok/s** (+55%)

The speed-up is larger for prefill than generation, consistent with generation being memory-bandwidth-bound on this hardware (adding compute units helps less than reducing weight bytes per token). A roofline measurement confirms: peak streaming bandwidth 357 GB/s, peak FP32 3901 GFLOP/s, ridge point 10.9 FLOP/byte — all LLM decode quantizations sit left of the ridge (bandwidth-bound regime). The unlock is bounded by power/cooling: the 40-CU arm ran at 116 W median vs 101 W at 24 CU, holding the clock ~3–4% lower under the oberon self-throttling governor. A better-cooled unit would likely gain more.

The long-context picture is strong. The Qwen3.5 35B-A3B MoE **runs to 64K filled** (16.6 tok/s, n=3) — provided `ttm.pages_limit` is genuinely at the full 16 GiB (§3.3). The dense qwen3.5:9b also runs to 64K (16.4 tok/s) and retrieves all 5 needles at 128K; its smaller footprint leaves more headroom alongside the always-on services, so it’s the safer production default — but the MoE is now a genuine long-context option, not short-context-only. And the **40-CU unlock carries this into long context**: re-run under the 14.7 GiB working-set guard, all four heavy MoEs climb the full 4K→64K ladder at 40-CU with 2/2 needle retrieval at every tier — the flagship Qwen3.5-35B-A3B at 74→48 tok/s — so the active-parameter speed advantage survives the long-context regime under the unlock, not just at stock 24-CU (§B9.2).