Llama on Apple M4

Can I run Llama 3.1 70B on an Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB?

Yes. Llama 3.1 70B at Q4_K_M uses 43.1 GB of the 96.0 GB available on a Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB, and runs at about 8.48 tokens per second. You can push the context to 128K.

Runs comfortably

43.1 GB of 96.0 GB · 45%
096 GB
Weights 40.0 GB
KV cache 2.5 GB
Runtime overhead 0.6 GB

Llama 3.1 70B at Q4_K_M leaves 52.9 GB spare on a Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB. There is room to raise the context length or move up a quantisation level.

Generation8.48tok/s
Prompt processing101tok/s
Max context128Ktokens
KV per 1K tokens0GB

Every quantisation of Llama 3.1 70B on a Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB

Highlighted row is the highest quality that still fits at 8K context.

QuantisationbpwWeights TotalVerdictMax ctxtok/s
FP16 / BF16 16.00 131.4 GB 134.5 GB Won't fit 0.81
INT8 / W8A8 8.50 69.3 GB 72.4 GB Runs comfortably 83K 4.97
Q8_0 (GGUF) 8.50 69.3 GB 72.4 GB Runs comfortably 83K 4.97
FP8 (E4M3) 8.00 65.7 GB 68.8 GB Runs comfortably 95K 5.23
Q6_K 6.56 53.9 GB 57.0 GB Runs comfortably 128K 6.35
Q5_K_M 5.67 46.6 GB 49.7 GB Runs comfortably 128K 7.32
Q5_K_S 5.52 45.3 GB 48.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 7.51
Q4_K_M 4.85 40.0 GB 43.1 GB Runs comfortably 128K 8.48
Q4_K_S 4.58 37.8 GB 40.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 8.95
AWQ 4-bit 4.25 37.8 GB 40.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 8.96
GPTQ 4-bit 4.25 37.8 GB 40.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 8.96
MXFP4 4.25 37.8 GB 40.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 8.96
Q4_0 4.55 37.6 GB 40.7 GB Runs comfortably 128K 9.00
IQ4_XS 4.25 35.2 GB 38.3 GB Runs comfortably 128K 9.59
Q3_K_M 3.91 32.5 GB 35.6 GB Runs comfortably 128K 10.4
IQ3_M 3.70 30.8 GB 33.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 10.9
IQ3_XXS 3.06 25.7 GB 28.8 GB Runs comfortably 128K 12.9
Q2_K 2.63 22.3 GB 25.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 14.8
IQ2_XXS 2.06 17.8 GB 20.9 GB Runs comfortably 128K 18.3
IQ1_M 1.75 15.3 GB 18.4 GB Runs comfortably 128K 21.0

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