LLaVA on Apple M1 · 8GB

❌ Won't fit — LLaVA 13B @ Q4_K_M
LLaVA 13B at Q4_K_M needs ~14.3 GB (weights 7.5 GB + KV 6.3 GB + overhead 512 MB @ 8K ctx) — more than your 2.9 GB usable of 8.0 GB unified. Try a smaller model or a lower quant.
quantneedsspeed
✗ Q8_020.1 GB—
✗ Q5_K_M15.6 GB—
✗ Q4_K_M14.3 GB—

Won't fit here — what hardware runs LLaVA? →

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LLaVA: Won't fit
for your own README — links back here

Same model, other machines: Apple M1 Pro · Apple M2 · Apple M3 Pro · Apple M2 Pro · Apple M4 Pro · Apple M3 Max

Also runs on a Apple M1: DeepSeek-R1 (distill) · Qwen2.5 · Qwen3 · Llama 3.2 · Gemma 2

Best models for a Apple M1 · 8GB →

Architecturally similar

These share LLaVA's KV-cache geometry — they size memory the same way, so here's how they fit on a Apple M1 · 8GB too:

modelsharesverdict here
Code Llama 32kv/128hd40kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
OLMo 2 7B 32kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit

Check any combo yourself: open the checker →