What GPU do I need to run moondream/parakeet-ultra?
627M parameters, published in F16. View on Hugging Face
Set up parakeet-ultraparakeet-ultra is published by moondream on Hugging Face, with 9,261 downloads and 72 likes to date. It's a ParakeetForTDT model built for automatic-speech-recognition, published natively in F16.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision, plus a fixed overhead for activations and allocator fragmentation. Speech models don't build the same growing KV-cache a text model does. Memory scales primarily with input audio length. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
| Precision | Weight size | Required VRAM | Cheapest live fit | GPUs needed | Est. $/hr (full fit) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 | 1.2 GB | 1.4 GB | RTX 3070 | 1 | $0.088/hr |
| FP8 (quantized) | 0.6 GB | 0.7 GB | RTX 4070 | 1 | $0.121/hr |
| INT4 (quantized) | 0.3 GB | 0.4 GB | RTX 3070 | 1 | $0.088/hr |
A GPU is only matched to a row if its hardware supports that precision, and the primary recommendation is always a single-GPU fit when one exists.
INT4 requires a quantized checkpoint actually published for this model, check its Hugging Face page before relying on this row.
Cheapest way to run parakeet-ultra at its published (F16) precision: 1× RTX 3070, at $0.088/hr per GPU ($0.088/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
parakeet-ultra: common questions
How much VRAM does parakeet-ultra need?
1.4 GB at FP16, 0.7 GB at FP8 (quantized), 0.4 GB at INT4 (quantized). All of those sit under 6 GB, the smallest capacity this page reasons about, so VRAM is not what limits where this model runs. The 1.2 GB of weights plus inference overhead is the whole requirement.
How many copies of parakeet-ultra fit on one RTX 3070?
5, by VRAM alone. That card carries 8.0 GB and one copy needs 1.4 GB at FP16, on a live rate of $0.088/hr for the whole card. Throughput is not modelled here, so 5 copies is not 5 times the requests served.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
More moondream models
- moondream3-preview (9.3B, BF16)
- bert-base-uncased (110M, F32)
- Qwen3-0.6B (752M, BF16)
- gpt2 (137M, F32)
- Qwen3-8B (8.2B, BF16)
- Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-FP8 (36.0B, F8_E4M3)
Related reading: RTX 3070 pricing and specs, The NVIDIA Inception program, explained, Google Colab alternatives for dedicated GPU access, Free GPU credits for students and researchers, and RunPod volume disk vs. network volume, compared.
