Yi 1.5 34B Chat on an H100 80GB (SXM5)
Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 4k tokens of context.
Verdict
Fits at FP16
73.6 GiB usable of 80 GB
Weights (Q4_K_M)
19.2 GiB
64.1 GiB at FP16 · 34.4B params · 6 of 6 quant rows are measured files
KV cache
240.0 KiB per token at FP16
60 layers × 8 KV heads × 128 dimensions
Speed ceiling
48 tok/s
3350 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/Yi-1.5-34B-Chat-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 4k tokens this model was trained to address.
| Precision | Bits/weight | Weights | Source | Fits | Max context | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 16.00 | 64.1 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 48 tok/s |
| Q8_0 | 8.50 | 34.0 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 89 tok/s |
| Q6_K | 6.56 | 26.3 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 115 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | 5.66 | 22.7 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 132 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | 4.81 | 19.2 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 155 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | 3.87 | 15.5 GiB | measured file | yes | 4,096 (model cap) | 190 tok/s |
What the context actually costs
The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 60 · 8 · 128 · 2 B = 240.0 KiB. It depends on the key/value head count, not the attention-head count and not the parameter count. This model shares 8 KV heads across 56 query heads, which divides the cache by 7 against multi-head attention.
| Context | KV cache (FP16) | KV cache (8-bit) | Plus Q4_K_M weights |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4,096 | 960 MiB | 480 MiB | 20.2 GiB |
The speed ceiling, and where it comes from
Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At FP16 / BF16 that is 64.1 GiB, plus a pass over the KV cache. An H100 80GB (SXM5) moves 3350 GB/s, so the arithmetic ceiling is 48 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
- 34,388,917,248
- Layers
- 60
- Attention / KV heads
- 56 / 8
- Head dimension
- 128
- Trained context
- 4,096
- Checkpoint as published
- 64.1 GiB
Read from 01-ai/Yi-1.5-34B-Chat. 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
- 80 GB HBM3
- Bandwidth
- 3350 GB/s
- Assumed usable
- 92% → 73.6 GiB
Capacity and bandwidth from the vendor's specification. The usable fraction is an assumption, not a spec: a driver context, compute workspace and any attached display come out of the same pool before a weight is loaded.
Questions this pairing answers
How much VRAM does Yi 1.5 34B Chat need?
64.1 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 34.4B parameters at two bytes each — and 19.2 GiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 240.0 KiB per token of context, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 1.9 GiB. An H100 80GB (SXM5) makes 73.6 GiB of its 80 GB available on the assumption below.
Can an H100 80GB (SXM5) run Yi 1.5 34B Chat?
Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 4k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 73.6 GiB of usable memory.
How fast will Yi 1.5 34B Chat run on an H100 80GB (SXM5)?
No faster than 48 tokens/second at FP16 / BF16, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 64.1 GiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 3350 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 Yi 1.5 34B Chat 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 60 layers and 8 key/value heads of 128 dimensions, shared across 56 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 7. That works out at 240.0 KiB per token. Parameter count tells you nothing about this number.
The same model on a different card
- A100 80GB (SXM)FP16 / BF16
- Jetson AGX Orin (64GB)Q8_0
- RTX 6000 Ada GenerationQ8_0
- L40SQ8_0
- Apple M4 Pro (48GB)Q8_0
- A100 40GB (SXM)Q8_0
- GeForce RTX 5090Q6_K
- Apple M4 Max (128GB)FP16 / BF16
A different model on the same card
All 62 models on H100 80GB (SXM5) →- KAT Coder V2.5 DevFP16 / BF16
- Qwen AgentWorld 35B A3BFP16 / BF16
- Laguna XS 2.1FP16 / BF16
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 32BFP16 / BF16
- Qwen2.5 32B InstructFP16 / BF16
- Qwen2.5-Coder 32B InstructFP16 / BF16
- QwQ 32BFP16 / BF16
- Qwen3 32BFP16 / BF16
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: 92% here, which is what this lane assumes for a dedicated card — the other class assumes 75%, 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.