Microsoft's best edge release. Fits 8GB RAM and runs fast on M1 MacBook Air in airplane mode. Exceptional at structured reasoning for its size — the top choice for on-device personal assistants and document Q&A.
This model requires a specialized High-VRAM environment. Ensure you have the latest CUDA Drivers or Metal Framework installed.
Minimum VRAM: 5GB VRAM Recommended
The Phi-4-mini model by Microsoft is a 3.8B dense parameter architecture optimized for chat tasks. It requires approximately 2.3GB of VRAM to comfortably run locally using a Q4_K_M quantization. Extending the context window up to 131,072 tokens will dynamically allocate further VRAM, meaning high-bandwidth memory hardware is strictly advised.
For running Phi-4-mini at maximum tokens-per-second, we recommend using LM Studio or Ollama with a GGUF quantization (Q4_K_M or Q6_K). If you are multi-GPU, use vLLM to distribute the layers across your VRAM pool for optimal throughput.
You will need a GPU with at least 5GB of VRAM to run the Q4_K_M quantized version smoothly with a moderate context window.
The simplest method is utilizing Ollama by executing 'ollama run phi4-mini' directly in your command line. Alternatively, you can search for the model via LM Studio's interface.