Yes — with 79.3 GB to spare

Qwen3.8 27B at Q4_K_M fits your M4 Max · 128 GB entirely in unified memory at 8K context, at an estimated 20 tokens per second. There is room for its full 256K window.

Fully in unified memory 8K context Q4_K_M · 15.6 GB Apache 2.0 Released 14 Aug 2026 New this week Vision

The current default local Qwen: dense 27B, text + image + video, 262K context. Only 16 of its 64 blocks keep a KV cache, so long context is cheap.

What hardware do I need for Qwen3.8 27B? →

The VRAM budget

weights 15.6 GB

Weights 15.6 GB KV cache @ 8K 0.50 GB Runtime overhead 0.6 GB Free 79.3 GB of 96.0 GB

Quantisation ladder

Quant	Weights	Total @ 8K	Max context	Tok/s	Quality	Fit
Q8_0	27.5 GB	28.6 GB	256K	11	−0.1% ppl	Long context
Q6_K	21.2 GB	22.3 GB	256K	14	−0.4% ppl	Long context
Q5_K_M	18.4 GB	19.5 GB	256K	17	−0.8% ppl	Long context
Q4_K_M	15.6 GB	16.7 GB	256K	20	−1.9% ppl	Recommended
Q3_K_M	12.7 GB	13.8 GB	256K	24	−5.4% ppl	Long context
Q2_K	10.8 GB	11.9 GB	256K	28	−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 16 of its 64 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

Ollama llama.cpp LM Studio MLX

terminal

$ pip install mlx-lm
$ mlx_lm.generate --model mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-4bit \
    --max-tokens 512 --prompt "Hello"

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

01Download is 15.6 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 96.0 GB of 128 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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