Gemma 4's Local Reality: Consumer Hardware Hits Memory Bandwidth Wall

Google's I/O 2026 keynote promised Gemma 4 runs smoothly on consumer laptops, but hands-on testing reveals a critical gap. The real bottleneck isn't GPU compute but memory bandwidth—the model starves for data even when the GPU appears busy. This exposes the hard truth: practical local LLM deployment remains severely constrained by current hardware limitations.