FireEcho is a from-scratch inference engine that runs Qwen3-Omni-30B (30.5 billion parameters, 128-expert MoE) on a single RTX 5090 at 45+ tokens/second using only 20 GB VRAM.
It achieves this through custom Triton kernels that fuse dequantization inside the matmul loop — no separate dequantization step, no global memory writes, no NVIDIA proprietary libraries.
Key Results
Metric
Value
Model
Qwen3-Omni-30B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters
30.5B total, ~3.3B active/token
GPU
NVIDIA RTX 5090 (32 GB, Blackwell)
VRAM Usage
20.0 GB (model) + 3.1 GB (KV cache)
Decode Speed
45+ tok/s (single user, greedy)
Compression
4x (BF16 61 GB -> FP4 20 GB)
Load Time
110 seconds (streaming, 3.1 GB CPU RAM)
Speedup
124x over naive PyTorch baseline
Benchmark Results (RTX 5090, 200 tokens/prompt, 8 diverse prompts)
Note: L1-L5 show slight overhead vs L0 due to additional dispatch logic. CUDA Graph (L6) eliminates all Python overhead and captures the full 48-layer forward as a single graph replay. The compression layers (FE-XC/INT2) reduce memory bandwidth which compounds with speculative decoding — with a trained EAGLE-3 head at 70% acceptance, projected throughput is ~457 tok/s.
Speed Optimization History
Starting from a naive Python loop over 128 MoE experts (0.4 tok/s), each optimization layer compounds:
Step
Optimization
tok/s
Cumulative Speedup
0
Baseline (128-expert Python loop)
0.4
1x
1
Grouped dispatch + TF32 + autotune
7.7
19x
2
Fused gate_up_proj (2->1 matmul)
9.5
24x
3
Single-token decode fast path
12.6
32x
4
Multi-expert Goliath kernel
18.8
47x
5
Packed MoE (contiguous buffer)
30.8
77x
6
Flat KV cache (zero torch.cat)
40.9
102x
7
CUDA Graph + FlashDecode
49.4
124x
The Goliath Kernel: Why It's Fast
Standard quantized inference dequantizes weights to BF16 in global memory, then runs a matmul. This doubles memory traffic.
Goliath FP4 dequantizes inside the Triton matmul tile loop — in registers, with zero global memory writes:
Packed MoE eliminates the Python expert loop entirely. All 128 experts are packed into one contiguous [128, K//2, N] buffer. A single Triton kernel launch reads expert IDs from a GPU tensor and indexes into the buffer — zero .item() calls, zero CPU-GPU synchronization.
Quantization Formats
Format
Bits
Compression
Quality
Used For
BF16
16
1x
Perfect
Attention Q/K/V/O
Goliath FP4
4
4x
Near-perfect
Hot MoE experts
FE-XC
2
8x
Very good (codebook)
Cold MoE experts
INT2
2
8x
Acceptable (scalar)
Coldest MoE experts
Goliath FP8
8
2x
Excellent
FP8 KV cache
FE-MX
4-8
2-4x
Adaptive
Hebbian memory
Unique Features
Hebbian Memory
Biologically-inspired fast weights that learn during inference (no backpropagation). Implements competitive learning, STDP traces, intrinsic plasticity, PMI correction, and GHA decorrelation. Papers: Lansner BCPNN, Triesch 2005, Sanger's GHA.
Atlas Gatekeeper (FE-AGK)
Runtime expert management:
Ban & Pick: Profiles expert impact, bans bottom 25% per layer (8->6 effective experts)
MoDES: Skips entire MoE computation for uncertain tokens (saves ~50% compute on many layers)
FE-XC / INT2 Cold Expert Demotion
Automatically compresses rarely-used experts to 2-bit:
Draft-then-verify acceleration. Draft head predicts K=5 tokens, target model verifies all 6 in one forward pass. Infrastructure complete, draft head training in progress.