Apple
Apple M2 16GB
Practical deployment guidance for this machine, using conservative fit estimates instead of marketing-style claims.
- Memory
- 16 GB unified/RAM
- System RAM
- 16 GB
- Bandwidth
- 100 GB/s
- Preferred backend
- MLX
Hardware notes
- Unified memory is shared, so usable model memory is lower than the advertised total.
- Great for 7B and 8B Q4-style local experiments.
Comfortable fits
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
comfortableQ4 at 8k context is estimated at 6.69 GB total and 6-11 tok/s.
Borderline fits
Phi-4
yesThis should fit, but headroom is limited. Keep background concurrency low and avoid stretching context further without re-checking the estimate.
Qwen2.5 Coder 14B Instruct
barelyThis is a tight fit. Expect CPU offload or memory pressure of roughly 0 GB, and consider a lighter quant or shorter context.
Backend support
These are the runtimes currently associated with this hardware profile.
MLXOllamallama.cpp
Use the live calculator
The calculator lets you change context length, runtime, quantization, and concurrency instead of relying on a fixed profile.