Hardware Calculators & Profilers

Edge AI Hardware & Memory Sizing Tools

Avoid buying under-specced mini-PCs that bottleneck on unified RAM. Calculate real-world Ollama / vLLM memory overhead including model parameters, quantization levels, and KV cache scaling.

Interactive Local LLM Memory & Hardware Calculator

2027 Edge Spec

Model Size (Billion Params)

Quantization Level

Context Window

Minimum Required Unified RAM / VRAM

9.7 GB

Recommended Node: Beelink SER9 (64GB Unified LPDDR5X)

Memory Sizing Rules of Thumb for 2027 Edge Models

Q4_K_M Quantization: Requires ~0.65GB to 0.75GB of VRAM per billion parameters plus context window overhead.
KV Cache Overhead: Scales linearly with context length. At 32K context on a 32B model, the KV cache alone consumes ~6.5GB of RAM.
OS & Proxmox Hypervisor Buffer: Always reserve at least 4GB of host RAM for Linux kernel, ZFS arc, and background Docker containers.