The "active" count is not very meaningful except as a broad measure of sparsity, since the experts in MoE models are chosen per layer. Once you're streaming experts from disk, there's nothing that inherently requires having 49B parameters in memory at once. Of course, the less caching memory does, the higher the performance overhead of fetching from disk.

> ~100GB at 16 bit or ~50GB at 8bit quantized.

V4 is natively mixed FP4 and FP8, so significantly less than that. 50 GB max unquantized.

Ahh, that actually makes more sense now. (As you can tell, I just skimmed through the READMEs and starred "for later".)

My Mac can fit almost 70B (Q3_K_M) in memory at once, so I really need to try this out soon at maybe Q5-ish.

Streaming weights from RAM to GPU for prefill makes sense due to batching and pcie5 x16 is fast enough to make it worthwhile.

Streaming weights from RAM to GPU for decode makes no sense at all because batching requires multiple parallel streams.

Streaming weights from SSD _never_ makes sense because the delta between SSD and RAM is too large. There is no situation where you would not be able to fit a model in RAM and also have useful speeds from SSD.