// IBM Granite · Embedding
granite-embedding-small-english-r2: VRAM & local deployment
48M parameters. About 0.5 GB at 4-bit and 0.6 GB at BF16.
released 2025-07-17licence: Commercial OKmemory figures are estimates
01Specs
| Publisher | IBM · ibm-granite |
|---|---|
| Family / series | IBM Granite · granite-embedding-small-english-r2 |
| Type | Embedding (feature-extraction) |
| Parameters | 48M Source: counted from official safetensors weights |
| Released weights | BF16 · 0.1 GBdownload |
| Licence | Apache-2.0 · Commercial OKPermissive licence (Apache-2.0 / MIT / CC-BY / OpenMDW): commercial use allowed. |
| Released | 2025-07-17 (Hugging Face repo created) |
02How much VRAM it needs (estimate)
Embedding models are small; memory grows with batch size and sequence length.
| Precision | Weights | Weights + overhead | Smallest GPU | Mac |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 / FP16 (original) | 0.1 GB | 0.6 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| FP8 / INT8 / Q8_0 | 0.1 GB | 0.6 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
| 4-bit (Q4_K_M / AWQ / GPTQ-Int4) | 0.0 GB | 0.5 GB | 8GB GPU | Mac 16GB |
Bits per weight: BF16 16, FP8 8.5, 4-bit 4.85. “Fits” = total ≤ 90% of memory; Mac GPU can use ~2/3 of unified memory (≤36GB) or ~3/4 (larger). For MoE, all experts must be in memory, so size by total parameters. Method →
03How to run it
Only runtimes the publisher or the runtime’s official library names for this model.
- Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
- Sentence Transformers — mentioned in the official model card
04Official repositories & quantised builds
1 official repo(s) from ibm-granite.
05Other IBM Granite models
All 67 →| Model | Params | 4-bit total | Released |
|---|---|---|---|
| granite-switch-4.1-8b | 8.78B | 7.8 GB | 2026-10-14 |
| granite-switch-4.1-30b | 30B | 22.7 GB | 2026-10-14 |
| granite-speech-5.0-2b | 2.31B | 2.0 GB | 2026-10-07 |
| ensemble-forecasting-with-ibm-granite-time-series | — | — | 2026-10-01 |
| granite-speech-5.0-470m-turboctc-nc | 473M | 0.8 GB | 2026-08-17 |
| granite-4.2-3b | 3.66B | 3.6 GB | 2026-08-07 |
| granite-4.2-8b | 8.79B | 7.7 GB | 2026-08-07 |
| granite-4.2-30b | 29.3B | 22.2 GB | 2026-08-07 |
06Sources
Data checked 2026-01-21. Parameters, context and licence are copied from the official repository; memory figures are our estimates.