Yes — with 382.8 GB to spare

Qwen3.5 0.8B at Q4_K_M fits your M3 Ultra · 512 GB entirely in unified memory at 8K context, at an estimated 914 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully in unified memory 8K context Q4_K_M · 0.5 GB Apache 2.0 Released 28 Feb 2026

Draft model for speculative decoding, or a classifier that fits in 1 GB.

What hardware do I need for Qwen3.5 0.8B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 0.5 GB
Weights 0.5 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.09 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 382.8 GB of 384.0 GB

Quantisation ladder

QuantWeightsTotal @ 8KMax contextTok/sQualityFit
F16 1.6 GB 2.3 GB 256K 276 Reference Long context
Q8_0 0.9 GB 1.6 GB 256K 519 −0.1% ppl Long context
Q6_K 0.7 GB 1.4 GB 256K 673 −0.4% ppl Long context
Q5_K_M 0.6 GB 1.3 GB 256K 778 −0.8% ppl Long context
Q4_K_M 0.5 GB 1.2 GB 256K 914 −1.9% ppl Recommended
Q3_K_M 0.4 GB 1.1 GB 256K 1129 −5.4% ppl Long context
Q2_K 0.3 GB 1.0 GB 256K 1318 −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. Only 6 of its 24 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
$ pip install mlx-lm
$ mlx_lm.generate --model mlx-community/Qwen3.5-0.8B-4bit \
    --max-tokens 512 --prompt "Hello"

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

01Download is 0.5 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 384.0 GB of 512 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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