Pure C GPT Implementation Hits 10M Tokens/Sec on Apple M5
A developer has released MicroGPT-C, a lightweight GPT-style language model implementation written entirely in C with no external dependencies. On Apple's new M5 chip, the project reportedly reaches 10 million tokens per second in its benchmark tests, a number that has caught attention on Hacker News despite the project's modest size.
The appeal isn't that this is a production-ready LLM — it's a compact, hackable reference implementation that strips away the layers of Python, CUDA, and framework overhead typically standing between a developer and the raw mechanics of a transformer model. Being pure C also means it can run practically anywhere with a C compiler, including embedded or resource-constrained environments.
Projects like this tend to serve as educational tools and performance testbeds rather than deployment targets, but the throughput numbers highlight just how much headroom modern Apple Silicon offers for hand-tuned, dependency-free code.