Model reference · open weights
granite-4.1 is an open-weight language model from IBM. granite-4.1-30b (BF16) weighs 57.7 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is H100 80 GB.
Summary of the ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.
What it is
| Released by | IBM |
|---|---|
| Released | 2026-04-06 |
| Parameters | 8.8B |
| VRAM | 57.7 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
| Card | Requests at once | Context max | Memory | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8K each | 32K each | |||
| RTX 3060 12 GB … L40S 48 GB 6 smaller cards | — | — | — | |
| A100 80 GB | 9 | 2 | 72K | 78.2 GB |
| H100 80 GB | 7 | 1 | 56K | 78.1 GB |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | 14 | 3 | 115K | 93.8 GB |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | 20 | 5 | all 128K | 107 GB |
| H200 141 GB | 34 | 8 | all 128K | 138 GB |
| B200 180 GB | 52 | 13 | all 128K | 176 GB |
| 2× L40S 48 GB tensor parallel | 13 | 3 | 105K | 44.0 GB a card |
| 4× RTX 4090 24 GB tensor parallel | 14 | 3 | 119K | 23.4 GB a card |
| 4× RTX 3090 24 GB tensor parallel | 15 | 3 | 120K | 23.4 GB a card |
| 4× RTX 5090 32 GB tensor parallel | 29 | 7 | all 128K | 31.0 GB a card |
| 2× H100 80 GB tensor parallel | 41 | 10 | all 128K | 78.1 GB a card |
| Requests at once | 8K tokens each | 32K tokens each |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60.7 GB | 67.2 GB |
| 5 | 69.3 GB | 102 GB |
| 8 | 75.8 GB | 127 GB |
| 16 | 93.0 GB | 196 GB |
| 32 | 127 GB | 333 GB |
| 64 | 196 GB | 608 GB |
One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.
Builds
| Build | Params | Precision | Weights | Smallest setup |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| granite-4.1-8b ↗ | 8.8B | BF16 | 17.6 GB | 2× RTX 3060 12 GB |
| granite-4.1-30b (above) ↗ | 28.9B | BF16 | 57.7 GB | H100 80 GB |
| granite-4.1-3b ↗ | 3.4B | BF16 | 6.8 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
| granite-4.1-8b-fp8 ↗ | 8.8B | FP8 | 9.6 GB | RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB |
| granite-4.1-3b-GGUF ↗ 15 builds: Q2_K 1.4 GB … BF16 6.8 GB |
— | GGUF | 2.1 GB | RTX 3060 12 GB |
From the model card
Model Summary: Granite-4.1-8B is a 8B parameter long-context instruct model finetuned from Granite-4.1-8B-Base using a combination of open source instruction datasets with permissive license and internally collected synthetic datasets. Granite 4.1 models have gone through an improved post-training pipeline, including supervised finetuning and reinforcement learning alignment, resulting in enhanced tool calling, instruction following, and chat capabilities.
Supported Languages: English, German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Italian, Korean, Dutch, and Chinese. Users may finetune Granite 4.1 models for languages beyond these languages.
Intended use: The model is designed to follow general instructions and can serve as the foundation for AI assistants across diverse domains, including business applications, as well as for LLM agents equipped with tool-use capabilities.
Capabilities
Generation: This is a simple example of how to use Granite-4.1-8B model.
Install the following libraries:
pip install torch torchvision torchaudio
pip install accelerate
pip install transformers
Then, copy the snippet from the section that is relevant for your use case.
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
device = "cuda"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
# drop device_map if running on CPU
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, device_map=device)
model.eval()
# change input text as desired
chat = [
{ "role": "user", "content": "Please list one IBM Research laboratory located in the United States. You should only output its name and location." },
]
chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, tokenize=False, add_generation_prompt=True)
# tokenize the text
input_tokens = tokenizer(chat, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
# generate output tokens
output = model.generate(**input_tokens,
max_new_tokens=100)
# decode output tokens into text
output = tokenizer.batch_decode(output)
# print output
print(output[0])
Expected output:
Tool-calling: Granite-4.1-8B comes with enhanced tool calling capabilities, enabling seamless integration with external functions and APIs. To define a list of tools please follow OpenAI's function definition schema.
This is an example of how to use Granite-4.1-8B model tool-calling ability:
import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
device = "cuda"
model_path = "ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)
# drop device_map if running on CPU
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, device_map=device)
model.eval()
tools = [
{
"type": "function",
"function": {
"name": "get_current_weather",
"description": "Get the current weather for a specified city.",
"parameters": {
"type": "object",
"properties": {
"city": {
"type": "string",
"description": "Name of the city"
}
},
"required": ["city"]
}
}
}
]
# change input text as desired
chat = [
{ "role": "user", "content": "What's the weather like in Boston right now?" },
]
chat = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(chat, \
tokenize=False, \
tools=tools, \
add_generation_prompt=True)
# tokenize the text
input_tokens = tokenizer(chat, return_tensors="pt").to(device)
# generate output tokens
output = model.generate(**input_tokens,
max_new_tokens=100)
# decode output tokens into text
output = tokenizer.batch_decode(output)
# print output
print(output[0])
Expected output:
You are provided with function signatures within XML tags:
{"type": "function", "function": {"name": "get_current_weather", "description": "Get the current weather for a specified city.", "parameters": {"type": "object", "properties": {"city": {"type": "string", "description": "Name of the city"}}, "required": ["city"]}}}
For each tool call, return a json object with function name and arguments within XML tags:
{"name": , "arguments": }
{"name": "get_current_weather", "arguments": {"city": "Boston"}}
Evaluation Results:
General Tasks
Alignment Tasks
Math Tasks
Code Tasks
Tool Calling Tasks
Multilingual Tasks
Safety
Model Architecture:
Granite-4.1-8B baseline is built on a decoder-only dense transformer architecture. Core components of this architecture are: GQA, RoPE, MLP with SwiGLU, RMSNorm, and shared input/output embeddings.
Training Data: Overall, our SFT data is largely comprised of three key sources: (1) publicly available datasets with permissive license, (2) internal synthetic dat
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.