---
license: apache-2.0
language:
- en
library_name: transformers
pipeline_tag: text-generation
base_model: ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b
base_model_relation: quantized
tags:
- granite
- awq
- w4a16
- compressed-tensors
- llmcompressor
- quantized
- vllm
---

# Granite 4.1-8B — AWQ W4A16

4-bit AWQ quantization of [`ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b`](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b),
produced with [`llm-compressor`](https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor) 0.6.0.1.

The result is a ~5.8 GB checkpoint (down from ~17 GB BF16) that loads on a single 24 GB GPU
with comfortable KV-cache headroom and serves natively in [vLLM](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm)
via the AWQ-Marlin kernels.

## Quantization details

| Setting | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Method | AWQ (Activation-aware Weight Quantization) |
| Scheme | W4A16 asymmetric, group size 128 |
| Ignored modules | `lm_head` |
| Targeted modules | All `Linear` layers |
| Calibration dataset | `HuggingFaceH4/ultrachat_200k` (`train_sft` split) |
| Calibration samples | 256 |
| Max sequence length | 2048 |
| Tool | `llmcompressor==0.6.0.1` |
| Output format | `compressed-tensors` (safetensors, sharded) |

The exact recipe used:

```python
from llmcompressor.modifiers.awq import AWQModifier

recipe = [
    AWQModifier(
        ignore=["lm_head"],
        scheme="W4A16_ASYM",
        targets=["Linear"],
    )
]
```

The full machine-readable recipe is also included in this repo as
[`recipe.yaml`](./recipe.yaml).

## Serving with vLLM

```bash
vllm serve pranavbapat/granite-4.1-8b-awq \
    --quantization awq_marlin \
    --dtype auto \
    --max-model-len 8192 \
    --gpu-memory-utilization 0.90 \
    --served-model-name granite-4.1-8b-awq
```

Then hit the OpenAI-compatible endpoint:

```bash
curl http://localhost:8000/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "granite-4.1-8b-awq",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
    "max_tokens": 64
  }'
```

Tested with `vllm==0.8.5.post1`, `torch==2.6.0+cu124`, NVIDIA L40S (Ada, sm_89).

## Loading with `transformers`

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer

model_id = "pranavbapat/granite-4.1-8b-awq"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_id)
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_id, device_map="auto")

prompt = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(
    [{"role": "user", "content": "Briefly: what is photosynthesis?"}],
    tokenize=False,
    add_generation_prompt=True,
)
inputs = tokenizer(prompt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
out = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=128)
print(tokenizer.decode(out[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
```

For best decode speed prefer the vLLM path — `transformers` will run the model in a
dequantized form on most architectures.

## Hardware compatibility

| Device | Status |
| --- | --- |
| NVIDIA Hopper (H100/H200) | ✅ via vLLM AWQ-Marlin |
| NVIDIA Ada Lovelace (L40S, RTX 4090) | ✅ via vLLM AWQ-Marlin |
| NVIDIA Ampere (A100, A10, RTX 3090) | ✅ via vLLM AWQ-Marlin |
| NVIDIA Turing and older | ⚠️ Marlin not supported — use the slower AWQ kernel |
| AMD / Apple Silicon | ❌ Use the original BF16 model with a different runtime |

## Files

| File | Purpose |
| --- | --- |
| `model-0000{1,2}-of-00002.safetensors` | Quantized weights, sharded |
| `model.safetensors.index.json` | Shard map |
| `config.json`, `generation_config.json` | Model + generation config |
| `tokenizer.json`, `tokenizer_config.json`, `vocab.json`, `merges.txt`, `special_tokens_map.json`, `chat_template.jinja` | Tokenizer files |
| `recipe.yaml` | llm-compressor recipe used for this quantization |

## Limitations

- AWQ is a **lossy** post-training quantization. Expect a small quality regression vs. the BF16 base — typically ≤ 1% on most reasoning benchmarks, but task-dependent.
- Calibration was done on `ultrachat_200k`, which biases towards English chat-style prompts. For domain-specific deployments (code, legal, medical, multilingual), re-calibrate on a representative sample of your own data for best fidelity.
- Inherits all behavioural and safety characteristics of the base model. See the [original Granite 4.1-8B model card](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b) for the full picture.

## Reproducing this checkpoint

The full pipeline (RunPod setup, quantization, serving, upload) is open and minimal.
Quantization step:

```python
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
from llmcompressor.modifiers.awq import AWQModifier
from llmcompressor import oneshot
from datasets import load_dataset

MODEL_ID = "ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b"
OUTPUT_DIR = "granite-4.1-8b-awq"
NUM_SAMPLES = 256
MAX_SEQ = 2048

model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID, torch_dtype="auto", device_map="auto")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(MODEL_ID)

ds = load_dataset("HuggingFaceH4/ultrachat_200k", split=f"train_sft[:{NUM_SAMPLES}]")
ds = ds.map(lambda ex: {"text": tokenizer.apply_chat_template(ex["messages"], tokenize=False)})
ds = ds.map(
    lambda ex: tokenizer(ex["text"], padding=False, max_length=MAX_SEQ, truncation=True, add_special_tokens=False),
    remove_columns=ds.column_names,
)

oneshot(
    model=model,
    dataset=ds,
    recipe=[AWQModifier(ignore=["lm_head"], scheme="W4A16_ASYM", targets=["Linear"])],
    max_seq_length=MAX_SEQ,
    num_calibration_samples=NUM_SAMPLES,
    output_dir=OUTPUT_DIR,
)
tokenizer.save_pretrained(OUTPUT_DIR)
```

On a single L40S this completes in roughly 60–90 minutes.

## License

This checkpoint inherits the **Apache 2.0** license of the upstream
[`ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b`](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b).
You are free to use, modify, and redistribute it under the same terms.

## Acknowledgments

- IBM Research for the [Granite 4.1](https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b) base model.
- The [vLLM](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm) team for AWQ-Marlin kernels.
- The [llm-compressor](https://github.com/vllm-project/llm-compressor) team for the quantization tooling.

## Citation

If you use this model in your work, please also cite the original Granite paper and the AWQ paper:

```bibtex
@article{granite2024,
  title  = {Granite Foundation Models},
  author = {{IBM Research}},
  year   = {2024},
  url    = {https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite}
}

@inproceedings{lin2024awq,
  title     = {AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for On-Device LLM Compression and Acceleration},
  author    = {Lin, Ji and Tang, Jiaming and Tang, Haotian and Yang, Shang and Chen, Wei-Ming and Wang, Wei-Chen and Xiao, Guangxuan and Dang, Xingyu and Gan, Chuang and Han, Song},
  booktitle = {MLSys},
  year      = {2024}
}
```