Can an M2 16GB Mac run DeepSeek V4 Flash?
M2 · 16 GB unified memory · 100 GB/s · MacBook Air 13" (M2), MacBook Air 15" (M2)
DeepSeek V4 Flash needs about 175.7 GiB but an M2 16GB Mac has only ~13.0 GiB available for a model — you are 162.7 GiB short. macOS will swap to SSD and generation will crawl.
Where the memory goes
Three things occupy memory when a model is loaded: the weights themselves, the KV cache that holds the conversation, and the runtime's own working buffers. Only the first is fixed — the KV cache grows with every token in your context.
| Quantisation | Weights | Total | Tok/s | Fits? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | 541.9 GiB | 570.5 GiB | 0 | No |
| Q8_0 | 287.9 GiB | 303.8 GiB | 0 | No |
| Q6_K | 223.5 GiB | 236.2 GiB | 0 | No |
| Q5_K_M | 193.1 GiB | 204.2 GiB | 0 | No |
| Q4_K_M | 166.0 GiB | 175.7 GiB | 0 | No |
| Q3_K_M | 132.1 GiB | 140.2 GiB | 1 | No |
| Q2_K | 101.6 GiB | 108.2 GiB | 1 | No |
The default. Best quality-per-gigabyte for most people.
How long a context fits
The KV cache is often what breaks a setup that looked fine at load time. Quantising it to 8-bit roughly halves its footprint with little measurable quality cost.
| Context | KV cache | Total | FP16 KV | Q8 KV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2K | 0.2 GiB | 175.0 GiB | No | No |
| 4K | 0.3 GiB | 175.2 GiB | No | No |
| 8K | 0.7 GiB | 175.7 GiB | No | No |
| 16K | 1.3 GiB | 176.7 GiB | No | No |
| 32K | 2.7 GiB | 178.6 GiB | No | No |
| 128K | 10.8 GiB | 190.3 GiB | No | No |
What to run instead on an M2 16GB Mac
These are the largest models that fit comfortably on this machine at Q4_K_M with an 8K context.
| Model | Size | Total | Tok/s | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen3 14B | 14.8B | 10.9 GiB | 9 | Yes, comfortably |
| Gemma 2 9B | 9.24B | 9.0 GiB | 14 | Yes, comfortably |
| Qwen3 8B | 8.2B | 6.8 GiB | 16 | Yes, comfortably |
| Llama 3.1 8B | 8.03B | 6.6 GiB | 16 | Yes, comfortably |
| DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B | 7.62B | 5.8 GiB | 17 | Yes, comfortably |
| Qwen2.5 7B | 7.62B | 5.8 GiB | 17 | Yes, comfortably |
Macs that run DeepSeek V4 Flash comfortably
The smallest configuration that handles it is the M3 Ultra 256GB (Mac Studio (M3 Ultra)).
| Mac | Memory | Bandwidth | Tok/s |
|---|---|---|---|
| M3 Ultra 256GB | 256 GB | 819 GB/s | 4 |
| M3 Ultra 512GB | 512 GB | 819 GB/s | 4 |
Common questions
- Can an M2 16GB Mac run DeepSeek V4 Flash?
- No. At Q4_K_M it needs about 175.7 GiB, and an M2 16GB Mac has roughly 13.0 GiB available for a model after macOS takes its share.
- How fast is DeepSeek V4 Flash on an Mac?
- Around 0 tokens per second. Token generation on Apple Silicon is limited by memory bandwidth, and this machine has 100 GB/s.
- How much memory does DeepSeek V4 Flash need?
- 166.0 GiB for the weights at Q4_K_M, plus 0.7 GiB for an 8K-token KV cache and about 9.1 GiB of runtime overhead — 175.7 GiB in total.