Run Gemma 4 26B MOE Locally on a Mac with Only ~6GB RAM

📰 Medium · LLM

Run Google's Gemma 4 26B MOE model locally on a Mac with ~6GB RAM using llama.cpp, mmap, and Metal, achieving 49 tokens per second

advanced Published 17 Apr 2026
Action Steps
  1. Install llama.cpp and its dependencies
  2. Configure memory-mapped files using mmap
  3. Set up Metal for GPU acceleration
  4. Download and load the Gemma 4 26B MOE model
  5. Run benchmarks to measure performance
Who Needs to Know This

Machine learning engineers and researchers can benefit from this guide to run large language models on local machines with limited RAM, improving development and testing efficiency

Key Insight

💡 The Mixture-of-Experts (MOE) architecture in Gemma 4 26B MOE allows it to run with limited RAM by only activating a subset of experts at a time

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🚀 Run Gemma 4 26B MOE locally on a Mac with ~6GB RAM! 🤯 Using llama.cpp, mmap, and Metal, achieve 49 tokens per second 📊
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