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Mistral AIDense

Pixtral Large 2411 RAM Calculator

Pixtral Large is a 124B parameter, open-weight, multimodal model built on top of [Mistral Large 2](/mistralai/mistral-large-2411). The model is able to understand documents, charts and natural images. The model is...

Standard Recommendation

96GB RAM

Calculated for 4-bit (Q4_K_M) @ 8K Context

1. Select Quantization Level

Quantization compresses model weights to reduce RAM usage, with minor impacts on output quality.

2. Set Target Context Length

Longer contexts require more active memory for the Key-Value (KV) cache.

8,192 tokens
1K tokens32K64K128K tokens

Inference Bandwidth & Speed Matrix

Estimates generation speeds (tokens per second) based on physical memory channel bandwidth constraints.

DDR4 CPU Mode

45 GB/s

0.6 t/s

DDR5 CPU Mode

96 GB/s

1.4 t/s

Mac Unified Memory

300 GB/s

4.3 t/s

GPU VRAM (RTX 4090)

1008 GB/s

14.4 t/s

*Token throughput calculated strictly from weight volume transfers over memory channels. Actual generation speeds can be further throttled by processing threads or VRAM offloading parameters.

Technical Specifications

Total Parameter Count124 Billion
Active Parameters Per TokenDense (All active)
Maximum Context Window131K tokens
Primary Framework SupportOllama, llama.cpp, ExLlamaV2, vLLM

GPU & VRAM Sizing Profile

Multi-GPU Workstation / Mac Studio
Est. VRAM Required75.8 GB VRAM
Target GPU Hardware4x RTX 3090 / 4090 (96GB VRAM) or Apple Mac Studio (128GB Unified Memory)

Hardware Profile: Advanced workspace setup. Apple Silicon Mac Studios with Unified Memory provide a massive cost-saving advantage here by utilizing pooled high-bandwidth shared RAM.

Pixtral Large 2411 Memory FAQs

How much RAM does Pixtral Large 2411 require?

To run Pixtral Large 2411 locally, memory size depends on your selected quantization. At 4-bit compression (Q4_K_M), the weights take up ~69.8GB of RAM. When combined with context cache and OS overhead, a standard **96GB system memory kit** is recommended. Unquantized FP16 execution requires a **384GB memory setup**.

What are the hardware requirements to run Pixtral Large 2411 at FP16 precision?

Running Pixtral Large 2411 at unquantized 16-bit precision requires loading ~248GB of model weights directly into VRAM or system memory. A minimum system memory target of **384GB RAM** is required to run the weights stably and avoid out-of-memory crashes.

Is Pixtral Large 2411 dense or Mixture-of-Experts (MoE)?

Pixtral Large 2411 is built on a **Dense** architecture. It features a dense parameter layout containing 124 Billion parameters. All weights are active and computed on every single pass during token generation.

How does context window size affect RAM usage for Pixtral Large 2411?

Context size directly scales the size of the Key-Value (KV) cache. At a standard 8,192 token context, the KV cache for Pixtral Large 2411 uses ~0.3GB. If you scale this to 131.072K tokens, the KV cache can scale past hundreds of GBs, requiring multi-GPU or workstation-class RAM configurations.