Qwen2.5-Coder on Apple M1 · 8GB

✅ Runs comfortably — Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B @ Q8_0
Qwen2.5-Coder 1.5B at Q8_0 needs ~2.2 GB (weights 1.5 GB + KV 224 MB + overhead 512 MB @ 8K ctx) of your 2.9 GB usable (of 8.0 GB unified memory) — plenty of headroom. Expect ~25–40 tok/s (fast).
context @ Q8_0: comfortable to 8K · runs to its full 32K
quantneedsspeed
✓ Q8_02.2 GB~25–40 tok/s (fast)
✓ Q4_K_M1.6 GB~35–60 tok/s (fast)
$runlocal install qwen2.5-coder:1.5b
runlocal verdict card
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Qwen2.5-Coder: Runs comfortably
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 Qwen2.5-Coder'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)
Llama 3.3 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
Mistral 7B 8kv/128hd 🐢 CPU-only (slow)
Mistral Small 3 8kv/128hd ❌ Won't fit
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 11 more — see the Qwen2.5-Coder page.

Check any combo yourself: open the checker →