A developer building a single-pass voice assistant with Gemma 4 12B unified (encoder-free audio/vision/text model) finds that audio attention collapses once the system prompt grows to ~21k tokens. The model then ignores or hallucinates instead of responding to the spoken input. The issue reproduces identically on vLLM, llama.cpp, and LiteRT-LM, pointing to an architectural attention-saturation limit rather than a stack-specific bug.
The author compared three llama.cpp Vulkan builds: default 4 sched copies, 1 sched copy, and no pipeline parallelism. In their Qwen GGUF test, input and output throughput were nearly identical across all configurations. However, the default setting used about 1.5GB more VRAM for compute buffers and reduced usable context from roughly 113K tokens to around 88K, though parallel-request benefits were not tested.