feat(vllm-cpp): enable and vendor the MLX GEMM provider on darwin/metal - #11137

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* docs(blog): final figures for the 4.8 post, and the MLX provider

The cycle closed at 374 PRs over twenty-one days, not the 321 over
eighteen the post was written against. Corrects the summary, the opening
line, the contributor count and the gallery total, and moves the date to
the day the release is cut.

Adds the MLX GEMM provider (#11137), which merged after the post was
written and is the one number an Apple Silicon reader wants: 1.54x to
2.19x on an M4 with time to first token roughly halving, both arms
toggled on one binary. The +/-10% caveat travels with the table rather
than being left in the PR.

Two lines edited against the no-ai-slop skill while I was in the file,
the same pass #11324 ran over the engines post:

- The opener balanced two clauses across a colon and closed on "without
  lying to you", which is the built-to-be-quoted shape readers picked
  out of the HN thread. It is a flat statement now.
- "This is a new modality rather than a new backend under an existing
  one" is a binary contrast that says nothing the next clause does not.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

* docs(blog): call vllm.cpp alpha, and finish the no-ai-slop pass

vllm.cpp is not a released backend and the post read like it was. The
old wording buried the caveat in a block quote at the end of the section
and still said "first release of a young engine". It now says plainly,
before the caveat can be skipped, that these are alpha development
builds, that shipping them in 4.8 is about letting people try the thing
rather than recommending it, and that llama-cpp stays the default.

Also completes the no-ai-slop pass I had only half run. Counting the
lines built to be quoted, headings and section endings included, the post
is in reasonable shape: long flat informational stretches, tables
followed by a plain finding, headings that are labels rather than
epigram-verdicts. Three patterns survived, each one an item in eval.md:

- "and inverts that:" set the usual shape against ours across a colon.
  The sentence works without the frame.
- "Two things were conflated there: a signal, which needs one line, and
  the detail, which needs somewhere to put it" is a role-assignment pair.
  Says what happens instead.
- "The maturity statement from the release notes is worth repeating in
  full" is throat-clearing in front of a quote, and the quote is gone.

Left the rest alone. Minimum effective edit, not a rewrite.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

* docs(blog): present vllm.cpp as a community project, with its own numbers

The post described vllm.cpp as "a from-scratch port of vLLM, written and
maintained by the LocalAI team". Two things wrong with that. It is a
community project, and it has stopped being only a port: it loads GGUF,
runs on CPU, Metal and Vulkan, ships speculative decoding and KV offload,
and its benchmark page measures against llama.cpp, MLX-LM and DwarfStar
as well as vLLM, because those are the engines it competes with on that
hardware.

vLLM's role is now stated for what it is, the reference implementation.
Correctness is checked against it and the scoreboard is kept against it.
Also flags that the name will probably change, since it is drifting far
enough that vllm.cpp will eventually mislead.

Adds real numbers from the project's own docs/BENCHMARKS.md rather than
adjectives: 1.045x vLLM at concurrency 1 on Qwen3.6-27B NVFP4 with
token-for-token identical output, 1.010x and 1.013x at c16 and c32 on the
35B MoE and behind below that, prefill 1.18x over llama.cpp on CPU
aarch64, 97.6% of MLX-LM warm total on an M4. Upstream's own caution
travels with them: it treats c2 through c32 as ties because its noise
band is 0.5% and those margins are 0.7% to 1.7%.

Every figure was checked against ~/_git/vllm.cpp/docs/BENCHMARKS.md
rather than restated from memory. The heading is marked alpha to match
the section body.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

* docs(blog): say who maintains vllm.cpp, and add the DeepSeek Flash result

Two corrections to the previous commit.

"A community project" says nothing and was not quite true either. The
LocalAI team maintains vllm.cpp. Community-first is the intent, not a
description, so it now says that and says what backs it: its own
repository, its own docs, benchmark record and issue tracker, and it runs
without LocalAI anywhere in the picture.

Adds the DeepSeek-V4-Flash result, which makes the divergence point
better than any of the prose around it. That model does not run on vLLM
on a single GB10: every vLLM-loadable checkpoint is 156 GB or more
against a 119 GiB unified pool, and the only quant that fits is an
extreme-low-bit GGUF that vLLM cannot load. vllm.cpp reads GGUF and runs
it at 16.28 tok/s against ds4's 16.33, a parity result. Also notes MTP
speculative decoding, token-identical to vLLM's and about 4% faster at
concurrency 1.

Both figures checked against ~/_git/vllm.cpp/docs/BENCHMARKS.md.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

* docs(blog): lead the DeepSeek result with what we run, not with what vLLM cannot

The previous version opened on "that model does not run on vLLM on a
single GB10 at all". Wrong emphasis twice over: it makes a strong
negative claim about another project the headline, and it buries the
actual result, which is that vllm.cpp runs DeepSeek-V4-Flash at roughly
2-bit (IQ2_XXS mixed, about 80 GB) on a single DGX Spark and decodes at
16.28 tok/s against DwarfStar's 16.33.

The size constraint is still there, stated as the reason the quant is
what it is rather than as a point about vLLM: at 300B+ total parameters
even a 4-bit checkpoint is 156 GB or more, so a 2-bit GGUF is what fits
the Spark's 119 GiB unified pool.

The table row now names the quant and the box (IQ2_XXS, one DGX Spark)
instead of just "GGUF, GB10", since that is the part a reader with a
Spark wants.

Figures unchanged and still from ~/_git/vllm.cpp/docs/BENCHMARKS.md.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

* docs(blog): say the new name is undecided

"The name will probably change at some point" invited the obvious
question. It now says the rename is expected and the name is still to be
decided, which is the actual state.

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Assisted-by: Claude Code:claude-opus-5 [Read] [Edit] [Bash]

---------

Signed-off-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>
Co-authored-by: Ettore Di Giacinto <mudler@localai.io>