BGE-M3 (embed, 1024-dim) at FP16 needs 1.1 GB for its weights and 7.6 GB in total at 8K context with 8 concurrent users. That means it fits on a single TPU v5p (per-chip, 95GB). Every figure is computed by tokcalc's open-source capacity model.
| GPUs | Total VRAM | VRAM needed | Decode tok/s | Aggregate tok/s | TTFT | Cost / 1M tok | Fits? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1× TPU | 95 GB | 7.6 GB | 468.6 | 5623 | 72.7 ms | $0.2075 | ✓ |
| 2× TPU | 190 GB | 7.6 GB | 796.7 | 19120 | 51.5 ms | $0.1220 | ✓ |
| 4× TPU | 380 GB | 7.6 GB | 1593 | 76478 | 40.8 ms | $0.0610 | ✓ |
| 8× TPU | 760 GB | 7.6 GB | 3187 | 305914 | 35.4 ms | $0.0305 | ✓ |
| Context | Concurrent users | KV per request | Fits? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4K | 233 | 412.3 MB | ✓ fits |
| 8K | 116 | 824.6 MB | ✓ fits |
| 33K | 29 | 3.22 GB | ✓ fits |
| 66K | 14 | 6.44 GB | ✓ fits |
| 131K | 7 | 12.88 GB | ✓ fits |
| GPU | GPUs | Aggregate tok/s | Cost / 1M tok |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3080 10GB | 1× | 5218 | $0.0106 |
| RTX 3090 24GB | 1× | 6427 | $0.0108 |
| RTX 5090 32GB | 1× | 12304 | $0.0113 |
| RTX 4090 24GB | 1× | 6921 | $0.0161 |
| RTX 4080 16GB | 1× | 4923 | $0.0169 |
| AMD MI300X 192GB | 1× | 36391 | $0.0191 |
Yes. BGE-M3 (embed, 1024-dim) at FP16 needs 7.6 GB including the KV cache, and TPU v5p (per-chip, 95GB) has 95 GB — so it fits on a single GPU.
468.6 tokens/sec per stream and 5623 tok/s aggregate with continuous batching at 8 concurrent users. Time to first token is 72.7 ms, and inter-token latency is 2.1 ms.
$0.2075 per 1M output tokens at 1× TPU v5p (per-chip, 95GB) ($4.20/hr). That is the marginal hardware cost — add idle capacity, ops, and egress for the real figure.
1.1 GB for the weights at FP16, plus 6.4 GB of KV cache for 8 concurrent requests at 8K context — 7.6 GB total. Every extra concurrent user at long context costs more, so leave headroom.
It works. Compare $0.2075 per 1M tokens against the alternatives below — the cheapest option that fits the same workload is 1× RTX 3080 10GB at $0.0106, and the fastest is 1× Cerebras CS-3 (WSE-3) at 137324 tok/s.
Same formulas, your context length, concurrency, and quantisation.