1. Start With the Work, Not the Hardware
The four SARION tiers are not four grades of the same product to be ranked by size. They are four answers to four different ways of working. A principal who reads documents and talks to an assistant needs something different from an office that delegates email, calendar and follow-up, and different again from an institution running many concurrent engineering sessions.
The common ground matters more than the differences. Every tier runs on hardware the client owns, with the model, memory and tools on the appliance and no subscription to a third-party model provider. The tiers change how much the system holds, what it does and how it behaves under failure.
2. The Four Tiers
| Tier | Compute | Built for |
|---|---|---|
| SARION Confidant | One workstation, 96 GB ECC GPU memory | A personal executive: bilingual conversation, voice and push-to-talk, web search, document analysis |
| SARION Regent | One workstation, 192 GB ECC GPU memory | An office that delegates: everything in Confidant, plus agentic reach across email, calendar, tasks and tools set up for the client |
| SARION Sovereign | Two interconnected workstations, 384 GB ECC GPU memory in total | A household or office where continuity matters: Regent at dual-node scale, with two-way replication, automated failover, and local image and video generation |
| SARION Monarch | Institutional supercomputing architecture, roughly 2.3 TB high-bandwidth memory plane | Engineering teams and principals who need frontier-scale models and many concurrent sessions, on site or in a dedicated Monaco data centre |
3. Four Questions That Decide It
What does the assistant need to do? If the answer is to think with the principal, read documents and talk, SARION Confidant covers the conversational stack. If it must also act, sending and sorting email, keeping a calendar, tracking tasks, SARION Regent adds that reach. Regent's tools are configured with the client after a direct conversation with the founding team, not chosen from a fixed list.
What happens if the machine stops? A single workstation is a single point of failure. If the cost of the assistant being unavailable for a day is acceptable, a single workstation fits. If it is not, SARION Sovereign keeps working on its surviving node while the other is serviced, with heavy tasks slowed and core conversation unaffected.
How many people and how much concurrency? Confidant, Regent and Sovereign are designed around one person or the household or family office acting for them. A team of engineers, or dozens of concurrent high-throughput sessions, is a different workload, and the one SARION Monarch is built for.
Does the client need media generation? Local text-to-image and text-to-video generation is part of SARION Sovereign. It is not part of Confidant, and it is not what a Regent is for.
4. Why Memory Is the Honest Number
Of the specifications a buyer sees, GPU memory best predicts what a system can do. It sets the largest model that fits, how many things can run at once and how much room a long document or a long conversation has.
Every tier carries ECC memory, which detects and corrects certain classes of memory error. That matters when output informs legal or financial decisions. A larger memory plane gives more room for larger models and concurrent work. It is not a measure of quality in itself, and we do not suggest a bigger tier gives better answers to the same question.
5. A Few Common Situations
- A principal who wants a private thinking partner and nothing more. SARION Confidant.
- A principal whose chief of staff handles email, diary and follow-up. SARION Regent, with tools configured to that workflow.
- A household or family office that cannot tolerate downtime, and wants private image or video generation. SARION Sovereign.
- An institution or an engineering team running models at scale, or a client whose building cannot host the hardware. SARION Monarch, on site or in Monaco.
6. What Does Not Change With the Tier
Three things hold across the range. The data does not leave the client's hardware. The client is not renting access to someone else's model. The system can be physically isolated from external networks: the Confidant and Regent tiers carry a manual isolation mechanism on the network interface, and Sovereign includes everything in Regent.
7. Before You Decide
- Write down the five tasks you most want to delegate, and the one you could not tolerate failing.
- Decide whether the assistant should act or only advise.
- Count the people who will use it, and at the same time.
- Ask what the site can host: power, cooling and floor loading.
Each tier is commissioned by application and consultation, not through an online checkout. To discuss which fits, request a confidential consultation at volta.quest.