TurboFieldfare runs Gemma 4 26B AI model on Mac using just 2 GB RAM
A developer has released TurboFieldfare, an open-source inference engine written in Swift and Metal that runs Google's 4-bit quantized Gemma 4 26B language model on any Apple M-series Mac using approximately 2 GB of RAM. The model's quantized weights total around 14 GB, making it impractical to load fully into memory on 8 GB or 16 GB Macs with conventional tools. TurboFieldfare works around this by keeping the model's shared components and KV cache in RAM while streaming only the required expert layers from SSD on demand, using parallel reads and a small expert cache to minimize latency. The engine delivers 5–6 tokens per second on an 8 GB M2 MacBook Air and 31–35 tokens per second on an M5 MacBook Pro. It also includes an experimental OpenAI-compatible local server with streaming and tool-call support, and the Mac app automatically downloads model weights from Hugging Face on first launch.
This is an AI-generated summary. ShortSingh links to the original source for the complete article.
Discussion (0)
Log in to join the discussion and vote.
Log in