Apple M2 Max meets the minimum VRAM requirement for Q4 inference of deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B. Review the quantization breakdown below to see how higher precision settings impact VRAM and throughput.
Apple M2 Max can run deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B with Q4 quantization. At approximately 50 tokens/second, you can expect Moderate speed - useful for batch processing.
You have 92GB headroom, which is sufficient for system overhead and smooth operation.
| Quantization | VRAM needed | VRAM available | Estimated speed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4 | 4GB | 96GB | 49.57 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |
| Q8 | 9GB | 96GB | 40.08 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |
| FP16 | 17GB | 96GB | 22.36 tok/s | ✅ Fits comfortably |