It should just about be usable in 32GB.

On a consumer hardware it would be nicer. With no GPU/iGPU or a 6-8GB VRAM.

It would be somewhat slow on a CPU only machine, but it still works.

Besides, Macbooks with 32GB RAM is consumer hardware, just maybe on the higher end.

Well maybe, but a non-macos laptop is a bit more common.

It is. I am running it on R9700

RAM is never the issue, it's always the compute power

RAM is not “never” the issue. My iPhone and MacBook Air could both run larger and more capable models if they had more RAM.

Quite the opposite, RAM is always the issue. More specifically, high bandwidth RAM.

and memory bandwidth

what??? not true!

for inference the compute is the last thing we need more of.

memory bandwidth is the numebr one blocker, after that the inefficiencies that where introduced with MoE models (and all new large models are made that way)

Here is a quick read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49324600

It's absolutely not for these models. There are plenty of consumer GPUs out there with 8 or 12GB VRAM - they are comparatively very fast at inference but just aren't big enough to run lots of the models you want. Also context management is a massive pain.

I run qwen3.5-9B on an RTX 3080 with 10GB of vram. It runs at ~77tk/s with around 50k context size.

As soon as I switch to a model that doesn't fully fit into vram it tanks to <10tk/s which makes it unusable for me for most tasks.

RAM bandwidth is the main issue for running LLMs on consumer hardware...

Give it 6 months, the capabilities will increase even further.