Some results with make clean; time make -j XX:

Admittedly the M3 Max is not compiling exactly the same code, but it is absurd how much faster it is.

I suspect that the difference with cmake is that it builds all the source files separately and then links. Changing the main rule in the Makefile to do something similar to that such as this, reduces the build time of make main from 1.4 secs to 150 ms:

main: examples/main/main.cpp                                  ggml.o llama.o $(COMMON_DEPS) console.o grammar-parser.o $(OBJS)
	$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) -c examples/main/main.cpp -o main.o
	$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) ggml.o llama.o console.o $(COMMON_DEPS) $(OBJS) main.o -o $@ $(LDFLAGS)

One problem with this is that it messes up the compiler identification in build-info:

main: build = 2059 (89cba479)
main: built with ccache version 4.8.2 for
main: seed  = 1707069976

Easy to fix:

@@ -717,7 +720,7 @@ swift: examples/batched.swift
 endif

 common/build-info.cpp: $(wildcard .git/index) scripts/build-info.sh
-       @sh scripts/build-info.sh $(CC) > [email protected]
+       @sh scripts/build-info.sh "$(CC)" > [email protected]
        @if ! cmp -s [email protected] $@; then \
                mv [email protected] $@; \
        else \

Thanks for the help. I rewrote the Makefile to compile each .c/.cpp/.cu to an object file first so it can be cached. The runtime on my systems is now:

To avoid spamming the root directory with object files they're put in the same directory as the source files. They're removed in make clean via find (which should be available on pretty much every system).