What GPU do I need to run tiiuae/falcon-7b?
7.2B parameters, published in BF16. View on Hugging Face
Set up falcon-7bfalcon-7b is published by tiiuae on Hugging Face, with 563,117 downloads and 1,104 likes to date. It's a FalconForCausalLM model built for text-generation, published natively in BF16.
VRAM required & cheapest live GPU fit
Required VRAM = weight size at each precision, plus a fixed overhead for KV-cache, activations, and fragmentation. Full formula and assumptions: methodology.
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 falcon-7b at its published (BF16) precision: 1× RTX 3090 on akash, at $0.147/hr per GPU ($0.147/hr total). Quantizing to FP8 or INT4 (rows above) can cost less, but requires a compatible quantized checkpoint to exist for this model.
falcon-7b: common questions
Does falcon-7b fit on a 24 GB GPU?
Yes. At BF16 it needs 16.1 GB of VRAM, so a 24 GB card holds it with 7.9 GB to spare. A 16 GB card is not enough for it at BF16.
What is the least VRAM falcon-7b can run in?
4.0 GB, at INT4 (quantized), which fits a 6 GB card, against 16.1 GB at BF16. That row assumes an INT4 checkpoint has actually been published for this model, so check its Hugging Face page before planning around it.
Does quantizing falcon-7b lower the GPU bill?
Yes. At BF16 the cheapest live fit is one RTX 3090 on akash at $0.147/hr. At INT4 (quantized) it drops to one RTX 3070 on simplepod at $0.050/hr, provided a quantized checkpoint exists for it.
Weight-to-VRAM math, the fit rules, and how live prices are normalized: full methodology.
More tiiuae models
- Falcon-H1-0.5B-Base (521M, BF16)
- falcon-mamba-7b (7.3B, BF16)
- falcon-7b-instruct (7.2B, BF16)
- Falcon3-7B-Instruct (7.5B, BF16)
- Falcon3-7B-Base (7.5B, BF16)
- Falcon-H1-7B-Instruct (7.6B, BF16)
