the engine track · own compiler · driver only

The Helix stack, racing NVIDIA's.

HIVE is a GPU inference engine built entirely on the Helix toolchain: the compiler emits the kernels, the driver runs them, and nothing else is in the stack — no CUDA toolkit, no cuBLAS, no cuDNN, no TensorRT, no PyTorch. Every published result is token-gated against an independent oracle, measured in interleaved rounds on one machine, and the losses are printed beside the wins.

What it is

An engine with a two-line stack.

Compiler → PTX → driver. That's the whole dependency graph, and every layer of it is the same auditable toolchain that rebuilds from 299 bytes.

Independent by construction

Every kernel HIVE runs was emitted by kovc, the Helix compiler. There is no NVIDIA toolkit on the machine, no vendor math library in the process, and the demo build proves this live: its receipt panel lists the shared libraries actually mapped into the running engine — the driver, and nothing else.

Verified the same way as everything else here

Results are token-gated: an independent reference implementation must agree with the engine's output, or the run is discarded rather than published. Identity batteries re-check this across prompts, and the same compiler-emitted PTX produces token-identical output across three GPU generations — sm_86, sm_89, sm_90 — with no per-architecture source.

Measured like an experiment, not a brochure

Same-round interleaved medians, both engines alternating on one machine, gate counts reported. Single-run numbers and non-interleaved comparisons are not used. Withdrawn results are removed, not footnoted.

The measured record

Wins and losses, on the same page.

Dated, measured medians from the full engine. A table showing only the wins would misrepresent where the engine stands — so this one doesn't.

H100 SXM5 · Qwen3-1.7B · vs TensorRT-LLM 1.2.1 (W4A16-AWQ, CUDA graphs on)

BatchHIVETensorRT-LLMResultLabelDate
B = 1594.8 tok/s494.6 tok/sHIVE 1.20×certified lane2026-07-30
B = 41765.2 tok/s1562.6 tok/sHIVE 1.13×adjudication open2026-07-30
B = 82891.7 tok/s2705.7 tok/sHIVE 1.07×adjudication open2026-07-30
B = 163764.9 tok/s4555.1 tok/sTensorRT-LLM 1.21×2026-07-30
B = 324227.8 tok/s8312.5 tok/sTensorRT-LLM 1.97×2026-07-30
B = 64≈4.7k tok/s≈14.7k tok/sTensorRT-LLM 3.1×2026-08-02
TTFT @51217.5 ms6.23 msTensorRT-LLM 2.8×2026-07-30

On the labels: B=1 is the certified lane — its correctness adjudication is complete and clean. B=4 and B=8 come from a faster lane whose adjudication has one case still open, so they are reported with that stated rather than presented as settled.

The moving edge — reported as research, not yet as record

Measured 2026-08-02, same pod, token-identical output at every point: a tensor-core decode lane raised HIVE's B=64 to ≈7.3k tok/s (narrowing the gap to ≈2.0×), and a tensor-core prefill lane brought TTFT to 14.7 ms (≈2.4×). Both are pre-certification research lanes; they enter the table above only when their certification completes — and if it fails, they won't.

RTX 3070 Laptop · 8 GB · sm_86

RivalAxisResultDate
vLLM · Qwen3-4B · both engines int4Prefill @1024HIVE 1.49×2026-07-24
vLLM · equal int4DecodeHIVE 1.3–1.8×2026-07-21
vLLM · 8B capacityQwen3-8B int4 in 8 GBHIVE runs it with full CUDA graphs; vLLM OOMs2026-07-21
llama.cpp · Qwen3-8BPrefill @1024HIVE 1.34×2026-07-20
llama.cpp · Qwen3-8BDecodeHIVE 1.25–1.26×2026-07-20
the card itselfDecode vs measured roofline~80% of achieved memory bandwidth2026-07-20

Bit-width disclosure: the llama.cpp pairing is not equal bit-width (~4.2 bits/weight vs ~5.0–5.3), so part of that margin is the format, not the engine. The vLLM comparison is equal-bit-width and is the fairer read. Roofline percentages use the bandwidth measured on this card, never the datasheet peak.

token-identical PTX across sm_86 · sm_89 · sm_90 NVIDIA components in the stack the driver — nothing else every published run token-gated vs an independent oracle withdrawn results removed, not footnoted
Race it yourself

HIVE Limited — the demo that measures itself.

A deliberately limited, source-available build. It answers one question at a time, and everything it shows you it measured on your machine while you watched — nothing is pre-recorded.

install · Linux or WSL · one line, about 10 minutes, mostly download
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Questeria/HIVE-Limited/main/install.sh | bash
needs an NVIDIA GPU + its ordinary driver — no CUDA toolkit, no Python knowledge → http://localhost:8080
install · native Windows, no WSL needed · PowerShell
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Questeria/HIVE-Limited/main/install.ps1 | iex
same checks, same folder discipline — your browser opens by itself → http://localhost:8080

Either installer checks your machine, fetches the ~4 GB model, and starts the arena. Every failure it can hit names its exact fix, and doctor.sh re-checks everything on demand. The engine is also callable from your own Python — construct it, hand it token ids, get tokens back — documented in the repository.

The HIVE Limited arena after a real race: HIVE wins this round 1.59× over llama.cpp, 115.4 versus 72.8 tokens per second, with live telemetry and the limitation banner on screen
One real race on the development machine: both engines answered the same prompt, timed on one clock, load time excluded. The banner is part of the page — this build never lets itself be mistaken for the full engine, and the result card itself says "one run, not a benchmark."
Said before you ask

What the demo is not.

HIVE Limited is limited by omission — the fast paths are absent, not disabled — so the demo can never be mistaken for the ceiling.

  1. It is not HIVE. Batch-1 only, one quantization form, no optimized prefill. The batch and serving paths, the compiler toolchain and the kernel research record are not in the repository at all.
  2. Its weights are heavier than a 4-bit rival's. The demo ships the finer per-32 quantization: exactly 5.000 bits per weight. In a race it reads more bytes per token than a 4-bit rival — the comparison states this rather than hiding it.
  3. The record above is not reproducible in the demo. Those figures come from the full engine. Nothing in the demo can produce them, and the demo says so on its own pages too.
  4. Rivals are installed by you, not bundled. The arena races engines you install from their own projects, under their own licenses, with ordinary flags — and claims no winner when no rival answered.
The unrestricted engine

See the full HIVE run.

The full engine is not public. For a live preview, licensing, or any question about the numbers on this page — including the losses — there is one inbox, and it belongs to the person who built the stack.