Only with CPU offload

Ornith 1.5 397B-A17B at Q4_K_M needs 224.1 GB but only 38.4 GB is addressable, so about 83% of the layers would stream from system RAM at roughly 60 GB/s. Expect around 1.7 tokens per second — usable for batch work, painful for chat.

17% on GPU 8K context Q4_K_M · 223.2 GB MIT Released 19 Aug 2026 New this week

The flagship Ornith on the Qwen3.5 397B-A17B architecture, MIT-licensed. A 256 GB Mac Studio at Q4, and it is in the Ollama library.

What hardware do I need for Ornith 1.5 397B-A17B? →

Fits instead: Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B (20.9 GB) · Ornith 1.5 9B (6.1 GB)

The VRAM budget

weights 223.2 GB
Weights 223.2 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.23 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Over budget 185.7 GB past 38.4 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
Q8_0 392.8 GB 393.7 GB ~0.9 −0.1% ppl 355.3 GB over
Q6_K 303.2 GB 304.0 GB ~1.2 −0.4% ppl 265.6 GB over
Q5_K_M 262.0 GB 262.9 GB ~1.4 −0.8% ppl 224.5 GB over
Q4_K_M 223.2 GB 224.1 GB ~1.7 −1.9% ppl 185.7 GB over
Q3_K_M 180.7 GB 181.5 GB ~2.3 −5.4% ppl 143.1 GB over
Q2_K 154.8 GB 155.7 GB ~2.7 −15% ppl 117.3 GB over

Quality is the published perplexity delta against f16 weights. Max context assumes an f16 KV cache; q8_0 roughly doubles it. Only 15 of its 60 blocks keep a per-token KV cache; the rest are linear-attention, Mamba or convolution blocks with a fixed-size state.

How to run it

terminal
$ llama-server \
    -hf ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-397B:Q4_K_M \
    -c 8192 -ngl 10

The engine underneath most of the others. Every knob is exposed. More on llama.cpp.

01Download is 223.2 GB. Keep it on an SSD — a first load off a spinning disk takes minutes.
02Close anything else holding VRAM. A browser with hardware acceleration can sit on 1–2 GB.
03If it falls back to CPU silently, drop the context first, then step down a quantisation.
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