Can I run SmolLM3-3B on a Mac with 96 GB?

Yes

Its published weights (6.15 GB) fit in the 72.0 GB a Mac with 96 GB can use, with room for ≈ 64K tokens of context.

Full analysis of SmolLM3-3B Everything that runs on Mac with 96 GB Get the weights on Hugging Face

hf download HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM3-3B

Files and context on Mac with 96 GB

Each file of SmolLM3-3B (and of GGUF versions the site has analyzed), and how much context fits next to it, with the context cache in 16-bit or 8-bit.

File	Size	On Mac with 96 GB	Context (16-bit)	Context (8-bit)
As published	6.15 GB	Fits	64K	64K
4-bit (estimate)	1.73 GB	Fits	64K	64K

SmolLM3-3B on other hardware

NVIDIA H100Yes
RTX 5090Yes
RTX 4090Yes
RTX 3090Yes
RTX 5060 Ti 16 GBYes
RTX 3060 12 GBYes
RTX 4060Yes, just
Mac with 32 GBYes
Mac with 64 GBYes
Mac with 96 GBYes
Mac with 128 GBYes

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Assumes 75% of the Mac's memory is usable (macOS's default limit for the GPU; it can be raised) and at least 4K tokens of context for one conversation, with the context cache in 16-bit unless noted. Fits leaves at least 20% of that memory for context; Tight leaves less.