phi-4 VRAM Requirements

phi-4 at a glance

Made by

Microsoft, United States

Released

December 11, 2024

Parameters

14.7B

Context window

16K tokens

License

MIT, commercial use allowed

On Hugging Face

2.3K likes, 372K downloads last month (opens in a new tab)

Runs with

vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp (Ollama, LM Studio), MLX (Mac)

On Ollama

ollama run phi4 7.7M pulls (opens in a new tab)

VRAM by precision and context length

Weights plus the KV cache of one request (BF16 cache), in GiB. Add 1 to 3 GiB for the inference engine itself.

phi-4 GGUF files

Exact size of each quantization in MaziyarPanahi/phi-4-GGUF (opens in a new tab), and the smallest GPU that runs it with llama.cpp, Ollama or LM Studio and an 8K-token context.

Read every day from Hugging Face. Split files are added together; vision projectors are left out.

How many GPUs to run phi-4

Fewest GPUs that fit the weights plus one 8K-token request. Data-center GPUs use vLLM (90% of memory usable), the others llama.cpp. Several GPUs split the model with tensor or pipeline parallelism.

8-bit: FP8 with vLLM (INT8 on GPUs without FP8), Q8_0 with llama.cpp. 4-bit: AWQ / GPTQ with vLLM, Q4_K_M with llama.cpp, both counted at the Q4_K_M size.

Cheapest way to run phi-4 today

For each GPU: the fewest cards that fit phi-4 with one 8K-token request, the most faithful weight format at that count, and the cheapest on-demand price (2026-10-14).

On-demand prices from RunPod, Vast.ai, Azure, Oracle Cloud, OVHcloud, Scaleway, Verda and Akash, checked every hour. Serving many users needs more KV cache, so more memory: size it in the calculator. Some links are affiliate links: StudioTV may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.

KV cache: how memory grows with context

Architecture: 40 layers · 40 full attention (10 KV × 128). Every layer keeps keys and values for every token (grouped-query attention), so the cache grows linearly with context.

phi-4 VRAM badge

For a model card or a README: the 4-bit size and the smallest GPU it fits on, linked to this page. Data as JSON: /api/models/phi-4.json.

[![phi-4 VRAM](https://studiotvai.com/badge/phi-4.svg)](https://studiotvai.com/vram-requirements/phi-4)

Other models

Same family (dense): Llama 3.1 8B · Mistral Small 3.2 24B · Qwen3 32B · Llama 3.3 70B · Llama 3.1 405B · Youtu-Parsing-Omni · Mistral 7B v0.3 · Mistral Small 3.1 24B · Mistral Nemo · DeepSeek R1 Qwen3 8B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B · Qwen3 4B · Qwen3 8B · Qwen2.5 7B · Qwen3 14B · Qwen2.5 3B · Qwen2.5 32B · Qwen2.5 14B · Qwen3-VL 8B · Qwen2.5-VL 7B · Qwen3-VL 4B · Qwen2.5-VL 3B · Qwen2.5-VL 32B · Qwen2-VL 7B · Phi-3.5-mini · Phi-4-mini · Phi-3-mini-128k

All models: Llama 3.1 8B · Mistral Small 3.2 24B · Qwen3 32B · Llama 3.3 70B · Llama 3.1 405B · Qwen3.5 4B · Qwen3.5 9B · Qwen3.8 27B · Qwen3.6 35B-A3B · Qwen3.5 122B-A10B · Qwen3.8-Flash-Next · LFM2.5 8B-A1B · LFM2 24B-A2B · Gemma 4 12B · Gemma 4 31B · Gemma 4 26B-A4B · gpt-oss 20B · gpt-oss 120B · Llama 4 Scout 17B-16E · Llama 4 Maverick 17B-128E · Kolibri-1 · Nemotron 3 Nano 30B-A3B · Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B · MiniMax M2.7 · DeepSeek R1 · Kimi K2.6 · GLM-5.3 · GLM-5.3-Flash · DeepSeek V4 Flash · DeepSeek V4 Pro · DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · MiMo-V2.6 Pro · MiMo-V2.6 Flash · Kimi K3 · Mistral Large 4 · Qwen3-Coder-Next 80B-A3B · Qwen3-Coder 30B-A3B · Qwen3-Coder 480B-A35B · DeepSeek V4 Flash Vision Exp · Qwen3.8 2.4T-A95B · Ornith 1.5 397B · Ornith 1.5 35B-A3B · Ornith 1.5 9B · Atria Dawn Preview · Intern S2 397B · Clef · Clef Flash · D1 3B · Humanizer · JEV 27B VL · Mellum2.1 12B-A2.5B · LightOnOCR-3 4B · Spark-X2.5 4B · Agnes-3.0-Qwen · Youtu-Parsing-Omni · Agnes-3.0-Flash · Mistral 7B v0.3 · Mistral Small 3.1 24B · Mistral Nemo · Ministral 8B · DeepSeek V3 · DeepSeek R1 Qwen3 8B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B · DeepSeek V3.1 · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B · DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B · Qwen3 4B · Qwen3 8B · Qwen2.5 7B · Qwen3 14B · Qwen2.5 3B · Qwen3.6 27B · Qwen3.5 27B · Qwen2.5-Coder 7B · Qwen2.5 32B · Qwen2.5-Coder 14B · Qwen3.5 35B-A3B · Qwen3 30B-A3B · Qwen2.5 14B · Qwen2.5-Coder 32B · Kimi K2.7 Code · Kimi K2.5 · Kimi K2 · GLM-5.2 · GLM-5.1 · GLM-5 · MiniMax M2.5 · MiniMax M2 · MiMo-V2.5 · Ornith-1.0 397B · Qwen2.5-Coder 3B · Qwen3 235B-A22B · Qwen3.5 397B-A17B · Gemma 4 E4B · Gemma 4 E2B · Nemotron 3 Nano 4B · Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B-A3B · MiniCPM-V-4.7 35B-A3B · LFM2.5 24B-A2B · GLM-4.7 · Qwen3-VL 8B · Qwen2.5-VL 7B · Qwen3-VL 4B · Qwen2.5-VL 3B · Qwen2.5-VL 32B · Qwen2-VL 7B · GLM-4.5-Air · GLM-4.5 · Phi-3.5-mini · Phi-4-mini · Phi-3-mini-128k

Estimates, not guarantees: computed from the official config.json with the same engine as the LLM VRAM Calculator. Real usage depends on your engine version and settings.