Can I run Granite 3.3 8B?

Granite 3.3 8B is IBM's entry in the crowded 8B chat tier, and it's aimed squarely at people who want a dependable local assistant they can actually ship on. At 8.2 billion parameters it lands around 5 GB at a 4-bit quant, so it fits on an 8 GB GPU, runs inside unified memory on any Apple Silicon Mac, and the 8 GB minimum RAM figure means it's within reach of fairly ordinary hardware. If you need it even smaller, the 2-bit build drops to about 3.4 GB, though you trade away quality to get there.

Day to day it feels quick and steady for chat. On an RTX 3060 12 GB you'll see around 62 tokens per second at 4-bit, comfortably faster than you read, and an RTX 4090 pushes that to roughly 172 tok/s. An M-series Max sits near 70 tok/s, while CPU-only on DDR5 is more like 10 tok/s and best reserved for patient, background work. The 128K context window is genuine, but treat it as a ceiling: filling it all the way pushes total memory to about 22 GB, so on an 8 GB card keep working context to a few thousand tokens.

Positioned against its peers, Granite 3.3 8B is the workhorse rather than the standout. Qwen 3 8B, nearly identical in size, generally has the edge on reasoning-heavy and multi-step prompts, and if you need real coding muscle the much larger Granite 4.0 H Small is the better fit. What this model offers instead is licensing clarity: it's Apache 2.0, so you can use it commercially and in production with no provider-specific strings attached. For a business that wants a small, predictable chat model it can deploy without legal second-guessing, that openness is the real draw.