Reame

Reame is an LLM inference server designed for ordinary CPUs, built specifically around ternary models, whose weights are limited to negative one, zero, or positive one. Because a ternary model's matrix products reduce to efficient integer operations, an 8-billion-parameter model can run in about 2.2 GB of memory, small enough for a free-tier ARM cloud instance, with no GPU required and no per-token billing.

It combines two engines: nucleo, a custom engine built from scratch that converts a model once into its own interleaved 2.125-bit format and handles ternary weight computation, and llama.cpp for everything else. The project publishes measured decode and prompt-processing throughput against the model vendor's own llama.cpp fork on the same ARM hardware, along with the full benchmark methodology, including cases where its own results are worse.

It exposes a single OpenAI-compatible API that any existing client can connect to, is written in C++, and is MIT licensed.