What Thinking Mode Actually Costs You (September 2026)
Reasoning tokens, latency, and KV cache cost of thinking mode in local LLMs. How to toggle it per runner and when it is the wrong choice.
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Reasoning tokens, latency, and KV cache cost of thinking mode in local LLMs. How to toggle it per runner and when it is the wrong choice.
The advertised context window is one number. What your GPU can actually serve is smaller. The KV cache math, RoPE scaling, and the practical ceiling.
Raspberry Pi 4 and Pi 5 can run small open-weight models on CPU alone. What fits on 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB, or 16 GB of RAM, and what speed is realistic.
The published GGUF file size is the weights. VRAM use also includes the KV cache, framework overhead, and your context length. The math, walked through.
Modern sub-10B models now rival last year's frontier AI on reasoning, tool use, and code. The benchmarks prove it.