Multilingual E5 Large (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 Mac M2 Ultra (192GB unified). 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× Mac | 192 GB | 7.6 GB | 464.3 | 5571 | 711.8 ms | — | ✓ |
| 2× Mac | 384 GB | 7.6 GB | 789.3 | 18943 | 371.1 ms | — | ✓ |
| 4× Mac | 768 GB | 7.6 GB | 1579 | 75771 | 200.5 ms | — | ✓ |
| 8× Mac | 1536 GB | 7.6 GB | 3157 | 303086 | 115.3 ms | — | ✓ |
| Context | Concurrent users | KV per request | Fits? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4K | 474 | 412.3 MB | ✓ fits |
| 8K | 237 | 824.6 MB | ✓ fits |
| 33K | 59 | 3.22 GB | ✓ fits |
| 66K | 29 | 6.44 GB | ✓ fits |
| 131K | 14 | 12.88 GB | ✓ fits |
| GPU | GPUs | Aggregate tok/s | Cost / 1M tok |
|---|---|---|---|
| RTX 3080 10GB | 1× | 5293 | $0.0105 |
| RTX 3090 24GB | 1× | 6519 | $0.0107 |
| RTX 5090 32GB | 1× | 12480 | $0.0111 |
| RTX 4090 24GB | 1× | 7020 | $0.0158 |
| RTX 4080 16GB | 1× | 4993 | $0.0167 |
| AMD MI300X 192GB | 1× | 36911 | $0.0188 |
Yes. Multilingual E5 Large (1024-dim) at FP16 needs 7.6 GB including the KV cache, and Mac M2 Ultra (192GB unified) has 192 GB — so it fits on a single GPU.
464.3 tokens/sec per stream and 5571 tok/s aggregate with continuous batching at 8 concurrent users. Time to first token is 711.8 ms, and inter-token latency is 2.2 ms.
— per 1M output tokens at 1× Mac M2 Ultra (192GB unified). 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 — per 1M tokens against the alternatives below — the cheapest option that fits the same workload is 1× RTX 3080 10GB at $0.0105, and the fastest is 1× Cerebras CS-3 (WSE-3) at 139286 tok/s.
Same formulas, your context length, concurrency, and quantisation.