Can the Apple M1 (16GB) run Mistral Nemo 12B?
Yes
QuantQ5_K_MVery good
Memory10.6 GBof 10.7 GB
Speed~5tokens/s
Yes. The Apple M1 (16GB) can run Mistral Nemo 12B fully in unified memory at Q5_K_M (very good), using about 10.6 GB of the 10.7 GB available, at roughly 5 tokens/second.
Try other context lengths in the calculator →Memory needed by quantization
At 8,192 tokens of context. macOS lets the GPU use about 10.7 GB of the 16 GB unified memory by default.
| Quant | Quality | Memory | Fits? | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | Full quality | 26.3 GB | Too big | — |
| Q8_0 | Near-lossless | 14.9 GB | Too big | — |
| Q6_K | Excellent | 11.9 GB | Too big | — |
| Q5_K_M | Very good | 10.6 GB | Fits | ~5 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | Good, most popular | 9.3 GB | Fits | ~6 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | Noticeably degraded | 7.9 GB | Fits | ~7 tok/s |
| Q2_K | Heavily degraded | 6.5 GB | Fits | ~9 tok/s |
How to run Mistral Nemo 12B on the Apple M1 (16GB)
With Ollama installed, one command downloads and starts it:
ollama run mistral-nemo:12bOllama's default download is Q4_K_M (about 9.3 GB here). You have room for Q5_K_M, which is very good: pick that GGUF in LM Studio or from Hugging Face.
GPUs that run Mistral Nemo 12B comfortably
- NVIDIA RTX 3080 10GB
- NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
- NVIDIA RTX 4070 (12 GB)
- NVIDIA RTX 5070 (12 GB)
- Apple M4 (16GB)
Models that run well on the Apple M1 (16GB)
Run it in the cloud
Don't want to buy hardware? Run Mistral Nemo 12B on a rented GPU today.
Rent a cloud GPU by the hour. No upfront cost, cancel any time.