HARDWARE FIT CHECK • Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) + Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)71.66 GB / 20 GB VRAM

Can I Run Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)?

Full VRAM footprint analysis, tokens/sec generation benchmark, and copy-paste Ollama & vLLM runtime commands for running Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) (109B) on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory) (20 GB).

✕ OOM71.66 GB (358%)0 t/s

Target Hardware & Model

interactive
Long-context codebase indexing & multi-document analysis on 64GB–128GB unified memory
Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)MoE (17B Active / 109B Total)

✕ Out of Memory — Exceeds VRAM Capacity

✕ OOM
Required VRAM
71.66 GB
358% of hardware capacity (20 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
0 tok/s
17B active params @ 273 GB/s
Available Headroom
-51.66 GB
Needs +51.66 GB more VRAM
Memory Allocation & Headroom
71.66 GB allocated of 20 GB capacity
358% utilized
Weights: 65.4 GBMoE (17B Active)
KV: (32K): 3.22 GB
Overhead: 3.04 GB
Deficit: -51.66 GB
Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~0 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory) (273 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~0 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).
MoE Memory vs Speed Architecture: While decode throughput scales with the active parameter count (17B parameters streamed per token), all 109B parameters must be resident in VRAM so the dynamic router can route tokens to any expert layer.

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

Out of VRAM: High-Capacity Hardware Upgrades
High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Multi-GPU Rig↑ Upgrade
48 GB VRAM

2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

Best price-to-VRAM homelab rig for Llama 3.3 70B Q4_K_M & Qwen 2.5 Coder 32B Q8_0

1648 GB/s700W TDP
Apple Silicon
20 GB VRAM

Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)

Portable 273 GB/s laptop running 14B–27B Q4_K_M models (Qwen 3.8 27B, Gemma 4 26B MoE)

273 GB/s45W TDP
Apple Silicon↑ Upgrade
54 GB VRAM

Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory)

Silent 65W desktop running 32B–70B models with large KV context

273 GB/s65W TDP
Apple Silicon✓ Fits Model
112 GB VRAM

Apple Mac Studio M4 Max (128GB Unified Memory)

Running Mistral Large 2 123B & Llama 3.3 70B Q8_0 locally with 128K context

546 GB/s145W TDP

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx • KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw218 GB3.22 GB229.6 GB (999%)0 t/sOOM
Q8_08.5 bpw115.54 GB3.22 GB123.55 GB (618%)0 t/sOOM
Q6_K6.56 bpw89.38 GB3.22 GB96.48 GB (482%)0 t/sOOM
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw77.39 GB3.22 GB84.07 GB (420%)0 t/sOOM
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw65.4 GB3.22 GB71.66 GB (358%)0 t/sOOM
FP44.25 bpw57.77 GB3.22 GB63.76 GB (319%)0 t/sOOM
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw44.69 GB3.22 GB50.22 GB (251%)0 t/sOOM

Export Full Architecture & Infrastructure Spec

Download an instant Markdown architecture spec with exact memory math, hardware benchmarks, and runtime CLI flags.

FAQ & Reference

Frequently Asked Questions: Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)

How much VRAM does Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) need on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)?

At standard 4-bit quantization (Q4_K_M) with 32K context, Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) requires 71.66 GB of total VRAM (weights + KV cache + CUDA runtime overhead).

What inference speed will Meta Llama 4 Scout (109B-A17B MoE) achieve on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)?

Based on Apple MacBook Pro M4 Pro (24GB Unified Memory)'s 273 GB/s memory bandwidth, expected decode speed is approximately 0 tokens per second.

Can I expand context beyond 32K tokens?

Each additional 32K tokens of context requires additional KV cache memory. For longer context windows, consider 8-bit or 4-bit KV cache quantization.