Mistral Small 3 on Apple M1 · 8GB

❌ Won't fit — Mistral Small 3 24B @ Q3_K_M
Mistral Small 3 24B at Q3_K_M needs ~12.5 GB (weights 10.7 GB + KV 1.3 GB + overhead 547 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_025.8 GB—
✗ Q5_K_M17.6 GB—
✗ Q4_K_M15.3 GB—
✗ Q3_K_M12.5 GB—

Won't fit here — what hardware runs Mistral Small 3? →

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Mistral Small 3: 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 Mistral Small 3's KV-cache geometry — they size memory the same way, so here's how they fit on a Apple M1 · 8GB too:

modelsharesverdict here
Llama 3.1 8kv/128hd 🐢 CPU-only (slow)
Qwen2.5-Coder 8kv/128hd ✅ Runs comfortably
Llama 3.3 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Mistral 7B 8kv/128hd 🐢 CPU-only (slow)
Mistral Nemo 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Codestral 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Llama 3.2 Vision 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Mixtral 8x7B 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit

…and 7 more — see the Mistral Small 3 page.

Check any combo yourself: open the checker →