Yes — with 20.0 GB to spare

Gemma 4 26B-A4B at Q4_K_M fits your M4 Pro · 48 GB entirely in unified memory at 8K context, at an estimated 33 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully in unified memory 8K context Q4_K_M · 14.9 GB Apache 2.0 Released 2 Apr 2026 Vision

Mixture of experts with 3.8B active. Slower to think than Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, faster to answer, and it sees images.

What hardware do I need for Gemma 4 26B-A4B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 14.9 GB

Weights 14.9 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.51 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 20.0 GB of 36.0 GB

Quantisation ladder

Quant	Weights	Total @ 8K	Max context	Tok/s	Quality	Fit
Q8_0	26.2 GB	27.3 GB	229K	19	−0.1% ppl	Long context
Q6_K	20.2 GB	21.3 GB	256K	25	−0.4% ppl	Long context
Q5_K_M	17.5 GB	18.6 GB	256K	28	−0.8% ppl	Long context
Q4_K_M	14.9 GB	16.0 GB	256K	33	−1.9% ppl	Recommended
Q3_K_M	12.1 GB	13.2 GB	256K	41	−5.4% ppl	Long context
Q2_K	10.3 GB	11.4 GB	256K	48	−15% ppl	Long context

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. This model interleaves sliding-window layers (1024 tokens, 5 of 30 layers global), which is why its cache barely grows with context.

How to run it

Ollama llama.cpp LM Studio MLX

terminal

$ pip install mlx-lm
$ mlx_lm.generate --model mlx-community/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-4bit \
    --max-tokens 512 --prompt "Hello"

Apple's own array framework. The fastest path on Apple Silicon. More on MLX.

01Download is 14.9 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.

02macOS caps what the GPU may wire down at about 36.0 GB of 48 GB. Raising it with iogpu.wired_limit_mb is possible, and risky.

03There is room to go to the model's full 256K context on this card.

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