What hardware do you need to run Ornith 1.5 9B?
Ornith 1.5 9B at Q4_K_M is 5.8 GB of weights, with a context ceiling of 256k tokens. Not yet rated: released after our last ratings pass. DeepReinforce's MIT-licensed coding model, post-trained on Qwen3.5.
How good is it, really?
It has not been placed on the intelligence index yet. See the whole table.
- Summarising — not rated
- Translation — not rated
- Everyday coding — not rated
- Reasoning & maths — not rated
- Agentic work — not rated
What it costs either way
Nobody rents Ornith 1.5 9B by the token. The closest hosted match, Qwen3.5 9B, costs $0.08 per million input tokens and $0.13 per million output (OpenRouter, cheapest active endpoint, checked 2026-09-15). Buying a machine only beats that if you use it hard enough, for long enough, that the hardware price divides down below the rental bill.
Machines that run it
| Machine | Price | Speed at 32k | Pay-back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac mini M6, 16GB | $899 | 17 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 69 years | Run the numbers |
| Strix Halo Framework Desktop, 32GB | $1,269 | 28 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 101 years | Run the numbers |
| MacBook Air M5 (13-inch), 16GB | $1,299 | 17 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 99 years | Run the numbers |
| MacBook Pro M5 (14-inch), 16GB | $1,999 | 17 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 153 years | Run the numbers |
| Mac Studio M5 Max, 36GB | $2,499 | 50 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 183 years | Run the numbers |
| DGX Spark GB10 Grace Blackwell, 128GB | $4,699 | 30 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 377 years | Run the numbers |
One machine per family, cheapest first. Speeds are measured where a public benchmark exists and estimated from memory bandwidth otherwise; the calculator says which for any configuration.
The specifics
- Parameters
- 9.7B
- Quantisation
- Q4_K_M
- Weights on disk
- 5.8 GB
- KV cache
- 1.1 GB at 32k context — Hybrid: three linear-attention layers per full-attention layer. Multimodal; the vision projector is a separate 0.92 GB file, not counted here.
- Maximum context
- 256k tokens (256k)
- Licence
- MIT
- Sources
- source 1, source 2