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LiquidAI / lfm2_moe

LFM2.5-8B-A1B

8.47 billion parameters, routing 4 of 32 experts per token.

Open in the calculator →

Architecturepublished data
Quick answer
LFM2.5-8B-A1B needs about 6.06 GB at Q4_K_M — the format most people download — with 8,192 tokens of context. It fits entirely on 18 of 18 common devices, starting with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 (12 GB). What else fits in 12 GB. No hardware for it? Rent a GPU that runs it, priced live.

Sized at 8,192 tokens of context with the whole model in device memory, across 18 common devices. Speeds are estimates, not benchmarks.

Find the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, the smallest card listed here that holds it: Amazon ↗ · eBay (new and used) ↗Store links may pay us a commission. They never decide which card is suggested — the memory arithmetic does.

Weight-file size by format

FormatSizeRangeBasis
FP1617.2 GB16.7 GB – 17.6 GBreconstructed size
Q8_09.01 GBexactpublished data
Q6_K6.96 GBexactpublished data
Q5_K_M6.03 GBexactpublished data
Q5_05.97 GB5.75 GB – 6.08 GBreconstructed size
Q4_K_M5.16 GBexactpublished data
Q4_04.84 GBexactpublished data
Q3_K_M4.32 GB3.96 GB – 4.68 GBreconstructed size
Q2_K3.24 GB3.01 GB – 3.41 GBreconstructed size

5 of these are published files. Open the pinned GGUF repository ↗

A file size is not the memory a run needs: the KV cache and the runtime reserve come on top, and the calculator adds both.

What the labels mean
published data
Read from a published source — a file's byte count, a model's configuration or a manufacturer's specification — or exact arithmetic on such values. Not a measurement on a machine.
reconstructed size
Weight size reconstructed from the pinned architecture, because no published file exists.
size range
Only a lower and an upper bound are claimed for this weight size.

Hardware ladder

Q4_K_M at 8,192 tokens · 18 of 18 devices hold it entirely
DeviceMemoryVerdictDecodeCalculator
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50706.06 GB of 12 GBfits~412 tok/sOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 9070 XT6.06 GB of 16 GBfits~450 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40806.06 GB of 16 GBfits~440 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50806.06 GB of 16 GBfits~589 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070 Ti6.06 GB of 16 GBfits~550 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB6.06 GB of 16 GBfits~275 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 40906.06 GB of 24 GBfits~618 tok/sOpen →
AMD Radeon™ RX 7900 XTX6.06 GB of 24 GBfits~675 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30906.06 GB of 24 GBfits~574 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50906.06 GB of 32 GBfits~1100 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada Generation6.06 GB of 48 GBfits~589 tok/sOpen →
Apple M4 Pro6.06 GB of 64 GBfits~100 tok/sOpen →
Apple M5 Pro6.06 GB of 64 GBfits~105 tok/sOpen →
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 with Radeon 8060S6.06 GB of 128 GBfits~180 tok/sOpen →
Apple M3 Max6.06 GB of 128 GBfits~116 tok/sOpen →
Apple M4 Max6.06 GB of 128 GBfits~127 tok/sOpen →
NVIDIA DGX Spark6.06 GB of 128 GBfits~168 tok/sOpen →
Apple M2 Ultra6.06 GB of 192 GBfits~140 tok/sOpen →

Decode is a calibrated estimate from the published calibration; capacity is the manufacturer's published ceiling, not guaranteed free memory. Fitting in memory is not the same as loading: whether the runtime and version you have supports this architecture and format on that machine has not been tested here. Offloaded rows assume there is enough system RAM for the overflow — the calculator checks that against the RAM you declare. Each “Open” link keeps this model, format and context.

Run it in the cloud

Rent a GPU that runs LFM2.5-8B-A1B

Every rentable machine that holds the whole model, from Vast.ai and RunPod, with this site's speed estimate for each and the provider's own price, read live. Cheapest first; sort by cost per token or speed instead, or switch the format.

Prices · 18:30 UTC, 22 Sept
28 configurations in stock · 5 out of stock
MachineSpeedPer hourPer M tokensWhereRent
1× RTX 306012 GBrecommendedcheapestbest value~220 tok/sFaster than you read$0.036$0.045Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.8% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 308010 GB~466 tok/sFaster than you read$0.082$0.049Vast.aiMarketplace · 98.3% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 30708 GB~274 tok/sFaster than you read$0.082$0.083Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.1% reliableRunPod $0.13/h Rent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 4060 Ti 16GB16 GB~176 tok/sFaster than you read$0.090$0.14Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.4% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 407012 GB~309 tok/sFaster than you read$0.096$0.086Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.8% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 309024 GB~574 tok/sFaster than you read$0.12$0.059Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.5% reliableRunPod $0.50/h Rent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 5060 Ti 16GB16 GB~274 tok/sFaster than you read$0.12$0.12Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.1% reliableRent on Vast.ai
1× RTX 3080 Ti12 GB~559 tok/sFaster than you read$0.14$0.067Vast.aiMarketplace · 99.9% reliableRent on Vast.ai

First time renting a GPU? How it works, in four steps
  1. Create an account and add credit. Both providers are prepaid: $10 is enough to try any card on this page for hours. A new RunPod account that arrives through a referral link gets a one-time $5 credit when it first adds $10.
  2. Pick the card and the count shown here, and a template: llama.cpp or vLLM for an OpenAI-compatible API, or one with a web chat if you only want to talk to the model. “How to launch it” below gives the exact image and command.
  3. Wait for the download. The weights are fetched on the machine; tens of gigabytes take a few minutes on a data-centre connection. You pay by the second from the moment it starts.
  4. Stop it when you are done. A running machine bills even when idle. A stopped one costs nothing per hour, though its disk is usually still billed until you delete it.
How to launch Q4_K_M on it (llama.cpp)
Container image
ghcr.io/ggml-org/llama.cpp:server-cuda
Start command / arguments
-hf LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B-GGUF:Q4_K_M -c 8192 -ngl 999 --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080
Expose port
8080 — an OpenAI-compatible API at /v1

Starting from a saved llama.cpp template instead? Leave the arguments empty and set these variables — only the first two change between models:

LLAMA_ARG_HF_REPO=LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B-GGUF:Q4_K_M
LLAMA_ARG_CTX_SIZE=8192
LLAMA_ARG_N_GPU_LAYERS=999
LLAMA_ARG_HOST=0.0.0.0
LLAMA_ARG_PORT=8080

Already have the runtime? llama-server -hf LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B-GGUF:Q4_K_M -c 8192 -ngl 999 --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080. Weights: LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B-GGUF. The CUDA image is for NVIDIA cards; an AMD machine needs llama.cpp's ROCm build.

Every machine holds the whole model at Q4_K_M and 8,192 tokens of context, no offload. Speeds are this site’s single-stream decode estimates; prices are what each provider’s own API quoted, on-demand, for the whole machine. Vast hosts below 98% measured reliability are left out.

Referral links Vast.ai, RunPod and Novita pay us a share of what you spend if you sign up through these buttons. It costs you nothing, and it never decides an order or a recommendation: both are computed from the live price and the speed, and options that pay us nothing are listed and recommended on the same terms. How we rank

Buying a card instead, or paying by the token? Compare a year of LFM2.5-8B-A1B three ways →

Under the hood

Architecture, read from the publisher’s file

The numbers every figure above is computed from, with the file they came from.

Architecture

✓ Architecture read from the published config.json

Retrieved 2026-09-01 at pinned commit 5dd22602c2e9; parameter count from the safetensors index at the same revision.

Architecture
lfm2_moe
Layers
24
Hidden size
2,048
Attention heads
32
KV heads
8
Feed-forward width
7,168
Vocabulary
128,000
Context ceiling
128,000
RoPE theta
5,000,000
Experts
32
Experts / token
4
Expert width
1,792

Where the memory goes

tokenembedding× 24 decoder blocksGrouped-query attention32 query · 8 KV headsfull contextRouted experts4 of 32 per tokenall residentoutputprojectiongrows with contextcapacity ≠ traffic

Grouped-query attention shares each key/value head across 4 query heads, so the KV cache is 25% of what multi-head attention would need at the same context.

Open the exact official config.json ↗

More from LiquidAI

LFM2.5-1.2B-InstructLFM2.5-2.6BLFM2.5-230MLFM2.5-350MLFM2.5-VL-3B

Use this answer in your own product

As JSON, from the API
curl -s https://llmbottleneck.com/v1/analyze \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $LLMB_KEY" -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model":"liquidai-lfm2-5-8b-a1b","quantization":"Q4_K_M","context":8192,"hardware":"nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090"}'

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On your page, as a widget
<script src="https://llmbottleneck.com/widget.js"
  data-model="liquidai-lfm2-5-8b-a1b" data-quantization="Q4_K_M"
  data-hardware="nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090" data-context="8192"></script>

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Citing this page

LLM Bottleneck. “LFM2.5-8B-A1B VRAM and hardware requirements.” Architecture from LiquidAI/LFM2.5-8B-A1B at revision 5dd22602c2e9, retrieved 2026-09-01. https://llmbottleneck.com/models/liquidai-lfm2-5-8b-a1b

Every figure above is either the published value or a reconstruction whose measured error is on the accuracy page.

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catalogue 2026-10-03models 327devices 135