Chapter 10. Validated models for x86_64 CPU inference serving


The following large language models have been validated for use with Red Hat AI Inference on x86_64 CPUs.

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Table 10.1. Validated models for inferencing with x86_64 CPU
ModelHugging Face model cardNumber of parameters

TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0

TinyLlama/TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0

1.1B

Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct

meta-llama/Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct

1B

granite-3.2-2b-instruct

ibm-granite/granite-3.2-2b-instruct

2B

TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0-pruned2.4

RedHatAI/TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v1.0-pruned2.4

1.1B (pruned)

Important

Quantization formats that require GPU-specific kernels, such as Marlin format, are not supported for CPU inference. Use AWQ or GPTQ quantization formats that are compatible with CPU execution.

The following table provides general guidance for approximate system RAM requirements based on model size:

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Table 10.2. Memory requirements for inference serving with x86_64 CPU
Model sizeMinimum RAMRecommended RAM

125M - 500M

8 GB

16 GB

500M - 1B

16 GB

32 GB

1B - 3B

32 GB

64 GB

Note

Actual memory usage depends on the model architecture, context length, and batch size. Increase the VLLM_CPU_KVCACHE_SPACE environment variable to allocate more memory for the key-value cache when using longer context lengths.

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