Computed

SmolLM2 135M Instruct on an Apple M4 (24GB)

Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 8k tokens of context.

Change the numbers →SmolLM2 135M Instruct on every card Apple M4 (24GB) across every model

Verdict

Fits at FP16

18.0 GiB usable of 24 GB

Weights (Q4_K_M)

101 MiB

257 MiB at FP16 · 135M params · 6 of 6 quant rows are measured files

KV cache

22.5 KiB per token at FP16

30 layers × 3 KV heads × 64 dimensions

Speed ceiling

262 tok/s

120 GB/s ÷ bytes read per token

Every quant, against this card

Weight bytes are the size of the real published file wherever one exists — 6 of these6 rows are measured from bartowski/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct-GGUF, the rest computed from the parameter count. Max context is what the KV cache can grow to in whatever memory the weights leave behind, capped at the 8k tokens this model was trained to address.

Bars are the weight bytes at each precision; the dashed line is the usable memory of an Apple M4 (24GB). Drawn from the computed byte counts, not sketched.

Precision	Bits/weight	Weights	Source	Fits	Max context	Ceiling
FP16 / BF16	16.00	257 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	262 tok/s
Q8_0	8.61	138 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	360 tok/s
Q6_K	8.23	132 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	367 tok/s
Q5_K_M	6.67	107 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	399 tok/s
Q4_K_M	6.27	101 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	408 tok/s
Q3_K_M	5.56	89 MiB	measured file	yes	8,192 (model cap)	425 tok/s

What the context actually costs

The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 30 · 3 · 64 · 2 B = 22.5 KiB. It depends on the key/value head count, not the attention-head count and not the parameter count. This model shares 3 KV heads across 9 query heads, which divides the cache by 3 against multi-head attention.

Context	KV cache (FP16)	KV cache (8-bit)	Plus Q4_K_M weights
4,096	90 MiB	45 MiB	191 MiB
8,192	180 MiB	90 MiB	281 MiB

The speed ceiling, and where it comes from

Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At FP16 / BF16 that is 257 MiB, plus a pass over the KV cache. An Apple M4 (24GB) moves 120 GB/s, so the arithmetic ceiling is 262 tok/s. Treat it as a bound, not an estimate: attention overhead, kernel launches and imperfect memory access keep real runtimes at roughly 60–80% of it, and nothing pushes past it.

Where these numbers come from

The model

Parameters: 134,515,008
Layers: 30
Attention / KV heads: 9 / 3
Head dimension: 64
Trained context: 8,192
Checkpoint as published: 257 MiB

Read from HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct. The parameter count is the Hub's own total over the tensor shapes, not a figure taken from the model's name.

The accelerator

Memory: 24 GB LPDDR5X unified
Bandwidth: 120 GB/s
Assumed usable: 75% → 18.0 GiB

Capacity and bandwidth from the vendor's specification. The usable fraction is an assumption, not a spec: unified memory is shared with the OS and the display, and the GPU working-set cap is raisable on Apple silicon with `sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb`.

Questions this pairing answers

How much VRAM does SmolLM2 135M Instruct need?

257 MiB for the weights at FP16 — 135M parameters at two bytes each — and 101 MiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 22.5 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 180 MiB. An Apple M4 (24GB) makes 18.0 GiB of its 24 GB available on the assumption below.

Can an Apple M4 (24GB) run SmolLM2 135M Instruct?

Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 8k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 18.0 GiB of usable memory.

How fast will SmolLM2 135M Instruct run on an Apple M4 (24GB)?

No faster than 262 tokens/second at FP16 / BF16, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 257 MiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 120 GB/s. That division is the ceiling — no kernel, runtime or driver beats it, and a real runtime typically reaches 60–80% of it.

Why does the context length change how much memory SmolLM2 135M Instruct needs?

Because the KV cache holds one key and one value vector per token, per layer, for the whole conversation, and it is allocated separately from the weights. This model has 30 layers and 3 key/value heads of 64 dimensions, shared across 9 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 3. That works out at 22.5 KiB per token. Parameter count tells you nothing about this number.

The same model on a different card

A different model on the same card

All 62 models on Apple M4 (24GB) →

Method and limits. Weight bytes are the byte size of the real published file wherever one exists, and the model's exact parameter count times the published llama.cpp bits-per-weight where it does not. That distinction is on every row above and it matters at both ends: a sub-1B model's Q4_K_M file runs a third larger than the nominal figure because k-quants keep its embedding tables at higher precision, and an already-4-bit release cannot be quantized upward at all. The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim · bytes per token, summed over layers with each sliding-window layer capped at its window. The speed figure is a roofline bound, not a benchmark: bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, which no runtime exceeds and every runtime falls short of. The usable fraction of card memory is an assumption: 75% here, which is what this lane assumes for unified memory, where the OS and window server share the same pool — the other class assumes 92%, so it is not one number applied to every device. That is the only assumed input on this page; every other figure is computed from the model config and the card's published specification. Nothing on this page is written by a language model. Architecture from the model's published config, fetched 2026-08-07.