Speech to text · whisper
Can I run Whisper small? Pick your device.
Whisper small is a 244M Speech to text. Realistic peak is ~0.85 GB of memory at fp16 (whisper.cpp). It runs on CPU, so most machines can run it; pick your hardware below.
Apple Silicon Macs
- Apple M1 (8GB) Yes
- Apple M2 (16GB) Yes
- Apple M4 (16GB) Yes
- Apple M5 (16GB) Yes
- Apple M3 Pro (18GB) Yes
- Apple M4 (24GB) Yes
- Apple M4 Pro (24GB) Yes
- Apple M5 (32GB) Yes
- Apple M4 Pro (48GB) Yes
- Apple M5 Pro (48GB) Yes
- Apple M4 Max (64GB) Yes
- Apple M4 Max (128GB) Yes
- Apple M5 Max (128GB) Yes
- Apple M3 Ultra (256GB) Yes
RAM-only laptops
iPhone & iPad
Android
NVIDIA GPUs
AMD GPUs
Memory is a sourced peak-usage anchor at fp16 (whisper.cpp), validated 2026-06-15. See methodology.