Without the 3D cache layer, how should you count the 7945HX for local AI?

  With the 3D cache stripped away the 7945HX keeps 64MB of L3 and loses part of the interactive sweetness, but it was aimed at throughput work in the first place: batched data preprocessing, embedding and quantized inference barely look at cache, 16 cores/32 threads with AVX-512 absorb them steadily, and the price lands lower — which makes this arithmetic the easier one.

  Throughput-shaped workloads make it a better deal than the 3D part; buyers who decide on interactive latency are the ones who should pay for that 128MB premium. The fork is not core count but workload shape. Dual-channel memory bandwidth still sets the pace of batched inference, so fill the modules before fussing over cache.