Director of ProductLondon, UK
I shape infrastructure products from the hardware up.
I’m Darren Soothill, a Director of Product working across infrastructure, hardware and storage. This is where product direction meets the bench: the systems I test, the trade-offs I find and the details that change the roadmap.
Current focus
Strix
Halo
Setup that can be repeated
Throughput in context
Thermals over time
Local AI on AMD Strix Halo
Capability · cost · experience · sustained performance
Product question / 01Local AI / 2026
When does local AI become a useful product choice?
01
Local LLMs on Strix Halo
The product question is bigger than a headline benchmark. Local inference changes privacy, cost, latency and deployment — but only if the hardware and software form a system people can actually use.
I’m taking that question to the bench: what I installed, what broke, how I measured it and which engineering trade-offs deserve to shape the product decision.
See the series roadmap-
01
GMKtec EVO-X3 baselinePublished
Hardware, firmware state and NVMe performance measured as one Linux system.
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02
Choose the runtimePlanned
ROCm, Vulkan and CPU paths without hand-waving.
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03
Find the useful modelPlanned
Context, quality and speed across practical quantisations.
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04
Keep it honestPlanned
Power, heat, sustained throughput and reproducible results.
The archive
Recent field notes
The technical detail behind product decisions: storage, Linux and the bits between a specification sheet and a working system.
View every noteGMKtec EVO-X3: the hardware, BIOS and NVMe baseline
A product-led examination of my Linux-based GMKtec EVO-X3: Strix Halo hardware, its provable firmware state and measured NVMe performance.
S3 Benchmarking: Multipart Upload & Download Testing with s3bench
A comprehensive guide to benchmarking S3 multipart download performance using s3bench - a Go tool for measuring throughput against AWS S3 and...
SPDK NVMe-oF Target Setup Guide for Ubuntu with RDMA
Complete step-by-step guide to configure SPDK NVMe over Fabrics target on Ubuntu Linux with RDMA transport for high-performance storage.
NVMe-oF with RoCE Configuration Guide - Ubuntu Server
Complete guide for configuring NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) with RoCE (RDMA over Converged Ethernet) on Ubuntu Server. Step-by-step persistent configuration for enterprise...
How I workDirection ↔ detail
“Good product direction starts with the customer problem — and survives contact with the hardware.”
Start with the outcome
Who needs the product, what must change for them and which constraint is real.
Get close to the system
Hardware, storage paths, versions and topology reveal the actual trade space.
Bring evidence back
Measurements and rough edges turn assumptions into roadmap decisions.
Comparing notes on local AI or storage?
darren@soothill.com