Autor: Jakub Rusinowski · Ostatnia aktualizacja: 11 września 2026
IBM's first family of dense decoder-only reasoning models, released August 2026 in 3B, 8B and 30B. Granite 4.2 drops the hybrid Mamba-2 MoE design of Granite 4.0 and continues the dense line Granite 4.1 started. Each size is pretrained from scratch on roughly 15T tokens with a five-phase context extension to 512K, then RL-post-trained for tool calling, RAG, structured JSON and an explicit thinking mode. All three are Apache 2.0.
| Licence | What it permits | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
Apache-2.0 | Commercial use permitted Commercial use permitted. No usage restrictions beyond attribution. | Granite 4.2 3B, Granite 4.2 8B, Granite 4.2 30B |
| Granite 4.2 3B | Min 3 GB VRAM · Q4_K_M · 131,072 ctx · ollama run granite4.2:3b |
| Granite 4.2 8B | Min 6 GB VRAM · Q4_K_M · 131,072 ctx · ollama run granite4.2:8b |
| Granite 4.2 30B | Min 19 GB VRAM · Q4_K_M · 131,072 ctx · ollama run granite4.2:30b |
The cheapest GPU that runs IBM Granite 4.2 locally (min 3 GB VRAM) is the Intel Arc B570 (10 GB).
Install Ollama then run: ollama run granite4.2:3b
Minimum VRAM: 3 GB. For best results use Q4_K_M quantization.
IBM Granite 4.2 needs about 3 GB VRAM at Q4_K_M quantization for its smallest variant. Variants: Granite 4.2 3B (3 GB, Q4_K_M); Granite 4.2 8B (6 GB, Q4_K_M); Granite 4.2 30B (19 GB, Q4_K_M). On Apple Silicon, unified memory counts toward this requirement.
Yes — IBM Granite 4.2 runs on an RTX 4090 (24 GB) and other 24 GB cards such as the RTX 3090. Smaller variants also fit comfortably on 8–16 GB GPUs at Q4_K_M.
Q4_K_M is the best balance of quality and VRAM for IBM Granite 4.2 in most cases. Choose Q8_0 for near-lossless quality if you have spare VRAM, or smaller quants (Q3/Q2) only when memory is tight.
Install Ollama, then run: ollama run granite4.2:3b. This downloads IBM Granite 4.2 and starts a local, OpenAI-compatible endpoint — no internet connection is needed after the initial download.