A jailbroken PS5 runs Qwen 3.8 27B at 20 tokens per second on its GPU

A developer posting as u/AdIllustrious7246 has forked Mert Cobanov's PS5LM project and turned it into a native PlayStation 5 app that runs Qwen 3.8 27B on the console's GPU at roughly 20 tokens per second. The same model previously managed about one token a minute on the CPU alone. The measurement is the author's own.

From payload to native app

Cobanov's PS5LM brought llama.cpp to jailbroken consoles as a payload that runs on the CPU, which caps it at about 6 GiB of memory and small models. The fork runs llama.cpp as a native app on the GPU through a RADV-based Vulkan driver and claims roughly 11.4 GiB to work with. The numbers the author reports:

• Qwen 3.8 27B, IQ2_XXS at a 64k context: about 20 tokens per second
• Gemma 4 E4B: about 61 tokens per second
• Llama 3.2 3B: about 124 tokens per second

Startup Fortune's write-up puts the Qwen figure at 20.3 tokens per second at 32k context, with a slightly different quantization reaching 20.7 at 64k, and describes the weights as compressed to about two bits each.

What those numbers do not say

Everything here is one developer's dashboard reading, on a console that must be jailbroken first, on firmware 7.00 through 13.60, with etaHEN, kstuff and ShadowMountPlus already loaded. Nobody has reproduced it independently, and no quality measurement was published. Two-bit quantization normally costs accuracy, and the thread said so: it ran past 100 comments, and several argued the compressed model is fine for chat and useless for anything serious. The hardware is fixed too. A PS5 carries 16 GB of GDDR6 and cannot be upgraded, so this is a curiosity rather than a deployment path.

Utilization is the story, not speed

A month ago the same model on the same console crawled at a token a minute. Moving inference from the CPU to the GPU is the entire story, and it echoes the efficiency argument behind this year's small mixture-of-experts releases. Commenters skipped the benchmark and went straight to the sillier end, with one asking whether consoles could be clustered for more memory. The cost math is less flattering. As the top reply noted, at the prices used PS5s have been fetching, this is not a cheap way to buy that much inference. The hardware angle is the same one that put a 90M model on a Sony PSP.

What would settle it

Three things: an independent reproduction by someone other than the author, published quantization and quality numbers for the 2-bit build, and a benchmark of the same model at the same precision on an ordinary GPU. Until then, the PS5 number demonstrates that the hardware works, not how well.