Can the Apple M1 Max (64GB) run Mistral Small 24B?

Apple M1 Max (64GB) × Mistral Small 24B8K context
YesRuns fully on the GPU
Memory at Q8_027 GB of 48 GB
Weights 25.1 GBKV cache 1.3 GBRuntime 0.6 GB
QuantQ8_0Near-lossless
Speed~10tokens per second
Max context32Kthe model's full window
  1. FP16
  2. Q8_0
  3. Q6_K
  4. Q5_K_M
  5. Q4_K_M
  6. Q3_K_M
  7. Q2_K

Yes. The Apple M1 Max (64GB) can run Mistral Small 24B fully in unified memory at Q8_0 (near-lossless), using about 27 GB of the 48 GB available, at roughly 10 tokens/second.

Run it with Ollama

With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts Mistral Small 24B:

ollama run mistral-small:24b

Ollama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 16.2 GB here). You have room for Q8_0, which is near-lossless: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.

New to this? Step-by-step setup for the Apple M1 Max (64GB)

Run it in the cloud

No Apple M1 Max (64GB)? Run Mistral Small 24B in the cloud.

Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, stop any time.

Memory needed by quantization

At 8,192 tokens of context. The black line marks the 48 GB the Apple M1 Max (64GB) can use. macOS lets the GPU use about 48 GB of the 64 GB unified memory by default.

QuantQualityMemoryFits?Speed
FP16Full quality49.1 GBToo big—
Q8_0Near-lossless27 GBFits~10 tok/s
Q6_KExcellent21.3 GBFits~12 tok/s
Q5_K_MVery good18.7 GBFits~14 tok/s
Q4_K_MGood, most popular16.2 GBFits~17 tok/s
Q3_K_MNoticeably degraded13.5 GBFits~21 tok/s
Q2_KHeavily degraded10.8 GBFits~27 tok/s

Measured speed from real Apple M1 Max (64GB) owners

Tokens per second that people measured on their own Apple M1 Max (64GB), next to our estimate.

No one has measured Mistral Small 24B on the Apple M1 Max (64GB) yet. The speeds above are estimates. Run the benchmark and yours becomes the first real number on this page.

Have an Apple M1 Max (64GB)? Add your real speed

One command times Mistral Small 24B in your own Ollama, shows you exactly what it would send, and asks before sending anything. No sign-up, no personal data.

macOS and Linux

curl -fsSL https://gpufit.dev/bench.sh | sh -s -- mistral-small:24b

Windows (PowerShell)

$env:GPUFIT_MODEL="mistral-small:24b"; irm https://gpufit.dev/bench.ps1 | iex

How the benchmark works

Frequently asked questions

Can Apple M1 Max (64GB) run Mistral Small 24B?

Yes. The Apple M1 Max (64GB) can run Mistral Small 24B fully in unified memory at Q8_0 (near-lossless), using about 27 GB of the 48 GB available, at roughly 10 tokens/second.

How much VRAM does Mistral Small 24B need?

About 16.2 GB at Q4_K_M with 8,192 tokens of context, and about 49.1 GB at full FP16 precision.

How fast is Mistral Small 24B on the Apple M1 Max (64GB)?

Roughly 10 tokens per second at Q8_0, estimated from the Apple M1 Max (64GB)'s 400 GB/s memory bandwidth.