Can Mac mini M2 16 GB run Llama 3.1 8B Instruct?
16 GB unified · 100 GB/s memory bandwidth · Llama 3.1 8B Instruct has 8B parameters.
Short answer
Yes, comfortable for chat; doesn't fit for coding in a repository.
Best quantization for chat: 4-bit (4.3 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 13–18 tok/s, leaving about 2.2 GB free for your other apps.
How it rates for each workload
Same model and machine, different jobs. Agents and long documents send far bigger prompts than chat, so they need much more speed and memory.
| Workload | Verdict | Quant | Generation | First reply | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwith Open WebUI | Comfortable | 4-bit | 13–18 tok/s | ≈5 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Borderline | 4-bit | 12–16 tok/s | ≈30 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Does Not Fit | — | — | — | — | Details |
Speeds are estimates calibrated against measured benchmarks on similar hardware. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 4-bit build with a 8K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct-GGUF:Q4_K_M
Downloads 4.92 GB (Q4_K_M). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=8192 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Mac mini M2 16 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- MiniCPM5 2B25–30 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 4B19–25 tok/sExcellent
- Llama 3.2 3B Instruct20–30 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 9B11–16 tok/sComfortable
- GLM-4.6V-Flash (10B)11–15 tok/sComfortable
- Qwen3 8B13–17 tok/sComfortable
Cheapest machines for Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 16 GB$599 · 15–20 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M6 16 GB$899 · 17–30 tok/sExcellent
- MacBook Air M4 16 GB$999 · 15–20 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M4 24 GB$999 · 11–14 tok/sComfortable
- MacBook Air M5 16 GB$1,099 · 15–25 tok/sExcellent
- Desktop PC · Intel Arc B580 · 32 GB RAM$1,150 · 30–45 tok/sExcellent
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.