1. Can NameTag 3 be Trained on a regular CPU or Is a GPU Required?

Training NameTag3 on a CPU is possible, but it will take significantly longer than on a GPU. The total time depends on the size of your dataset and the CPU’s performance.

For reference, the NameTag 3 Multilingual Model was trained on an NVIDIA Quadro P5000 GPU with 21 corpora and a batch size of 8 in about 9 hours.

Typical CPU slowdowns compared to this GPU run:

• Fast 16-core CPU: ~10× slower, ~3 days
• 8-core desktop CPU: ~6 days
• Laptop CPU or weaker: up to ~40× slower, ~15 days

As a rough guideline, CPU training is often around 30× slower than GPU training.