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Comment by Zambyte

5 months ago

Is this Mac only? Or is that an Ollama issue that it only supports this release of models on Mac? It seems like every tag with the MLX badge is only supported on Mac[0], and that includes all of the tags in this release.

[0] https://ollama.com/library/gemma4/tags

Edit: MLX being Mac-only is independent of the model being MLX (and therefore Mac) only. The latter is what I am asking about.

12 comments

Zambyte

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embedding-shape  5 months ago

MLX is quite literally macOS-specific technology, for other platforms you want non-MLX.

I was sure "MLX" stood for "Metal-something-something" but can't find any reference to that somehow, anywho, "Metal" is hardware-accelerated graphics on Apple platforms FWIW.

Edit: about the actual release on Ollama, if you're on non-Apple hardware you probably want the NVFP4 variant ("gemma4:12b-nvfp4") which was uploaded 45 minutes ago, especially if you're with a recent nvidia GPU.

  • Patrick_Devine  5 months ago

    I realize this is a little confusing; we're working w/ the MLX team to bring MLX to other platforms, but we're not quite there yet. The `gemma4:12b-nvfp4` model is specifically for the MLX engine.

    For the GGUF 4bit variant (i.e. non-macs) you'll need `gemma4:12b-it-q4_K_M` which I just pushed. You'll also need to upgrade to version 0.30.4 which we're just about to release (it's in prerelease and we're running through our last regression tests).

    • embedding-shape  5 months ago

      I gotta say, having both "gemma4:12b-mlx-bf16" and "gemma4:12b-nvfp4" be MLX-specific, and not labeling all of the MLX-specific ones as such, is a bit different than "little confusing" and more "set up to be confusing" :)

      > You'll also need to upgrade to version 0.30.4 which we're just about to release

      Interesting, wasn't Google coordinating today's release with you? Considering the blog post seems to have gone out way before the release even been cut.

      2 replies →

Zambyte  5 months ago

The non-MLX versions just dropped on Ollama. gemma4:12b-it-q8_0, gemma4:12b-it-bf16, etc.