Mixtral 8x7B Instruct on Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified)
Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified) cannot run Mixtral 8x7B Instruct at any quantization level. The 18 GB of VRAM is insufficient.
Model Size
46.7B
Device VRAM
18 GB
Bandwidth
150 GB/s
Quantizations Tested
1
Performance by Quantization
Each row shows Mixtral 8x7B Instruct performance at a different quality level on Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified).
| Quantization | Speed | TTFT | Fits in VRAM | Rating | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q2_K | — | — | ✗ Offload | Not Viable | estimated |
Notes
Q2_K
MoE 16.4GB exceeds 14GB effective. Doesn't fit.
About Mixtral 8x7B Instruct
Mixtral 8x7B Instruct (46.7B) is a chat, coding, reasoning, multi-purpose model. Mixture of Experts model — 46.7B total params but only ~12.9B active per token. Excellent quality-to-speed ratio. Despite large total params, inference speed closer to a 13B model. Needs more VRAM for the full weight set though.
View all Mixtral 8x7B Instruct hardware options →About Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified)
Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified) has 18 GB at 150 GB/s. Available in MacBook Pro 14", MacBook Pro 16".
See all models Apple M3 Pro (18GB Unified) can run →Source: MLX performance estimates (2026-03-15)
Data last updated: 2026-03-01