Speculative decoding pipeline showing draft, verify, and commit stages for local LLM inference

Speculative Decoding Is Finally Useful for Local LLMs

Speculative decoding has moved from inference-paper trivia into the local LLM hot path. The useful version now includes ngram speculation, native MTP heads, DFlash-style drafting, and TurboQuant / TCQ KV compression, with early llama.cpp forks showing both real speedups and real rough edges.

May 7, 2026 · 16 min · 3279 words · Marco