Lab · LLM VRAM · Qwen
ComputedQwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct memory requirements
7.6B parameters — 14.2 GiB of weights at FP16, 4.4 GiB at Q4_K_M, and 56.0 KiB of KV cache per token on top. Solved against 22 real accelerators; 22 of them can hold it.
Parameters
7.6B
7,615,616,512 exactly
Weights, Q4_K_M
4.4 GiB
14.2 GiB unquantized
KV cache
56.0 KiB
per token · 28L × 4 KV × 128
Smallest card (Q4)
8 GB
Jetson Orin Nano Super (8GB)
Weights at each precision
| Precision | Bits/weight | Weights | Source | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 16.00 | 14.2 GiB | measured file | Unquantized. Two bytes per parameter, exactly. |
| Q8_0 | 8.51 | 7.5 GiB | measured file | Effectively lossless; the usual reference point for quantized quality. |
| Q6_K | 6.57 | 5.8 GiB | measured file | Quality loss is hard to measure on most benchmarks. |
| Q5_K_M | 5.72 | 5.1 GiB | measured file | A middle point when Q4 fits with too little room for context. |
| Q4_K_M | 4.92 | 4.4 GiB | measured file | The default choice for local inference — the best size/quality knee. |
| Q3_K_M | 4.00 | 3.5 GiB | measured file | Measurable quality loss. Worth it only to make a model fit at all. |
Every accelerator
Largest quant that fits with at least 4k of context, the context it leaves, and the bandwidth ceiling on decode speed. Each row links to the worked page for that pairing.
| Accelerator | Memory | Bandwidth | Best quant | Max context | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple M3 Ultra (512GB) | 512 GB | 819 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 52 tok/s |
| H200 141GB (SXM) | 141 GB | 4800 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 306 tok/s |
| Apple M4 Max (128GB) | 128 GB | 546 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 35 tok/s |
| H100 80GB (SXM5) | 80 GB | 3350 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 213 tok/s |
| A100 80GB (SXM) | 80 GB | 2039 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 130 tok/s |
| Jetson AGX Orin (64GB) | 64 GB | 204.8 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 13 tok/s |
| RTX 6000 Ada Generation | 48 GB | 960 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 61 tok/s |
| L40S | 48 GB | 864 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 55 tok/s |
| Apple M4 Pro (48GB) | 48 GB | 273 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 17 tok/s |
| A100 40GB (SXM) | 40 GB | 1555 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 99 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 5090 | 32 GB | 1792 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 114 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 4090 | 24 GB | 1008 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 64 tok/s |
| Radeon RX 7900 XTX | 24 GB | 960 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 61 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 3090 | 24 GB | 936 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 60 tok/s |
| Apple M4 (24GB) | 24 GB | 120 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 32,768 | 8 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 5080 | 16 GB | 960 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 10,013 | 61 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 5070 Ti | 16 GB | 896 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 10,013 | 57 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER | 16 GB | 736 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 10,013 | 47 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER | 16 GB | 672 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 10,013 | 43 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB | 16 GB | 288 GB/s | FP16 / BF16 | 10,013 | 18 tok/s |
| GeForce RTX 3060 12GB | 12 GB | 360 GB/s | Q8_0 | 32,768 | 42 tok/s |
| Jetson Orin Nano Super (8GB) | 8 GB | 102 GB/s | Q5_K_M | 17,397 | 17 tok/s |
Questions about this model
How much VRAM does Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct need?
14.2 GiB for the weights at FP16 and 4.4 GiB at Q4_K_M, from an exact count of 7,615,616,512 parameters. On top of that, the KV cache costs 56.0 KiB per token of context — 448 MiB at 8k and 1.8 GiB at 32k.
What is the smallest GPU that runs Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct?
Of the 22 accelerators here, the smallest that holds Q4_K_M weights is the Jetson Orin Nano Super (8GB) at 8 GB — 4.4 GiB of weights against 6.0 GiB usable, leaving room for 30k tokens. For unquantized weights you need at least a GeForce RTX 5080.
Why is the KV cache for Qwen2.5-Coder 7B Instruct the size it is?
Because it stores one key and one value vector per token, per layer: 28 layers × 4 KV heads × 128 dimensions × 2 (K and V) × 2 bytes = 56.0 KiB per token. Grouped-query attention shares those 4 KV heads across 28 query heads, cutting the cache by 7× against multi-head attention. None of this can be read off the parameter count.
Compare with
- Qwen2.5 7B Instruct4.4 GiB
- Qwen3 8B4.7 GiB
- Qwen3 4B2.3 GiB
- Qwen3 14B8.4 GiB
- Qwen2.5 14B Instruct8.4 GiB
- Qwen2.5 3B Instruct1.8 GiB
- Qwen3 1.7B1.1 GiB
- Qwen3 30B-A3B17.3 GiB
- Qwen3 32B18.4 GiB
- Qwen2.5 32B Instruct18.5 GiB
Method and limits. The parameter count and every architecture figure on this page are read from the model's own published config and the Hub's index over its tensor shapes, fetched 2026-08-07 — nothing here is recalled from a model's name. Weight bytes are the size of a real published file wherever one exists and the parameter count times the published llama.cpp bits-per-weight where it does not; every row says which. Speed figures are roofline bounds — memory bandwidth divided by bytes read per token — not benchmarks. Nothing on this page is written by a language model.