Can MacBook Pro M3 Max 128GB run Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1?
Apple · 128 GB LPDDR5 · 400 GB/s bandwidth ·
Mistral · 46.7B (active 12.9B) · MoE · model ctx up to 32K
Yes — the MacBook Pro M3 Max 128GB (128 GB LPDDR5) can run Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1. At Q4 with the default 8K context it needs ≈ 29.27 GB VRAM (weights 25.69 GB + KV cache 2.58 GB + 1 GB runtime overhead), which fits within 128 GB. Decode at Q4/8K: ≈ 19.7 tok/s (estimated, batch 1). FP16 (≈ 96.98 GB) also fits, at ≈ 5.4 tok/s (estimated). Estimates come from memory-bandwidth math; rows tagged measured override estimates. Relative ranking is more reliable than absolute tok/s. Methodology.
Fit & speed by quant and context
Quant
Context
VRAM needed
Fits?
tok/s (decode)
Q4
4K
27.98 GB
Yes
19.7est.
Q4
8K default
29.27 GB
Yes
19.7est.
Q4
32K
37.01 GB
Yes
19.7est.
FP16
4K
95.69 GB
Yes
5.4est.
FP16
8K default
96.98 GB
Yes
5.4est.
FP16
32K
104.72 GB
Yes
5.4est.
Fits = weights + KV(ctx) + 1 GB overhead ≤ 95% of VRAM. Measured
anchors are context-agnostic; the fit verdict is recomputed per context. A missing tok/s
means the model is far beyond this card (offload-only territory).