Unlocking 128K Context AI Models on Apple Silicon Macs: A Developer’s Guide

Ultimate Guide to Running 128K Context AI Models on Apple Silicon Macs Introduction: Unlocking Long-Context AI Potential Modern AI models like Gemma-3 27B now support 128K-token contexts—enough to process entire books or codebases in one session. This guide walks through hardware requirements, optimized configurations, and real-world performance benchmarks for Apple Silicon users. Hardware Requirements & Performance Benchmarks Memory Specifications Mac Configuration Practical Context Limit 64GB RAM 8K-16K tokens 128GB RAM Up to 32K tokens 192GB+ RAM (M2 Ultra/M3 Ultra) Full 128K support Empirical RAM usage for Gemma-3 27B: 8K context: ~48GB 32K context: ~68GB 128K context: ~124GB Processing Speed Insights …