Model reference · open weights
Zamba2 is an open-weight language model from Zyphra. Zamba2-1.2B-instruct (FP32) weighs 2.4 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.
For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.
Summary of the Zyphra/Zamba2-1.2B-instruct model card, 2026-10-01
What it is
| Released by | Zyphra |
|---|---|
| Released | 2024-09-19 |
| Parameters | 1.2B |
| VRAM | 2.4 GB for the weights |
What it runs on
How much memory each request adds isn't estimated yet for this architecture. The weights need at least the cards below, plus room for the context.
| Card | Weights alone |
|---|---|
| RTX 3060 12 GB | fits |
| RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB | fits |
| RTX 3090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 4090 24 GB | fits |
| RTX 5090 32 GB | fits |
| L40S 48 GB | fits |
| A100 80 GB | fits |
| H100 80 GB | fits |
| RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB | fits |
| DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified | fits |
| H200 141 GB | fits |
| B200 180 GB | fits |
From the model card
Zamba2-1.2B-instruct is obtained from Zamba2-1.2B by fine-tuning on instruction-following and chat datasets. Specifically:
Zamba2-1.2B-Instruct is a hybrid model composed of state-space (Mamba2) and transformer blocks.
To download Zamba2-1.2B-instruct, install transformers from source:
git clone https://github.com/huggingface/transformers.gitcd transformers && pip install .To install dependencies necessary to run Mamba2 kernels, install mamba-ssm from source (due to compatibility issues with PyTorch) as well as causal-conv1d:
git clone https://github.com/state-spaces/mamba.gitcd mamba && git checkout v2.1.0 && pip install .pip install causal-conv1dYou can run the model without using the optimized Mamba2 kernels, but it is not recommended as it will result in significantly higher latency and memory usage.
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import torch
# Instantiate model and tokenizer
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("Zyphra/Zamba2-1.2B-instruct")
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained("Zyphra/Zamba2-1.2B-instruct", device_map="cuda", torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16)
# Format the input as a chat template
prompt = "What factors contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire?"
sample = [{'role': 'user', 'content': prompt}]
chat_sample = tokenizer.apply_chat_template(sample, tokenize=False)
# Tokenize input and generate output
input_ids = tokenizer(chat_sample, return_tensors='pt', add_special_tokens=False).to("cuda")
outputs = model.generate(**input_ids, max_new_tokens=150, return_dict_in_generate=False, output_scores=False, use_cache=True, num_beams=1, do_sample=False)
print((tokenizer.decode(outputs[0])))
Zamba2-1.2B-Instruct achieves leading instruction-following and multi-turn chat performance for a model of its size and matches strong models significantly larger. For instance, Zamba2-1.2B-Instruct outperforms Gemma2-2B-Instruct, a very strong model over 2x its size.
| Model | Size | Aggregate MT-Bench | IFEval |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zamba2-1.2B-Instruct | 1.2B | 59.53 | 41.45 |
| Gemma2-2B-Instruct | 2.7B | 51.69 | 42.20 |
| H2O-Danube-1.8B-Chat | 1.6B | 49.78 | 27.95 |
| StableLM-1.6B-Chat | 1.6B | 49.87 | 33.77 |
| SmolLM-1.7B-Instruct | 1.7B | 43.37 | 16.53 |
| Qwen2-1.5B-Instruct | 1.5B | N/A | 34.68 |
Moreover, due to its unique hybrid SSM architecture, Zamba2-1.2B-Instruct achieves extremely low inference latency and rapid generation with a significantly smaller memory footprint than comparable transformer-based models.
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | Output Generation |
|---|
And memory overhead
Zamba2-1.2B utilizes and extends our original Zamba hybrid SSM-attention architecture. The core Zamba architecture consists of a backbone of Mamba2 layers interleaved with one or more shared attention layers. This attention has shared weights to minimize the parameter cost of the model. We find that concatenating the original model embeddings to the input to this attention block improves performance, likely due to better maintenance of information across depth. The Zamba2 architecture also applies LoRA projection matrices to the shared transformer blocks to gain some additional expressivity in each block and allow each shared block to specialize slightly to its own unique position while keeping the additional parameter overhead small.
Note: this is a temporary HuggingFace implementation of Zamba2-1.2B. It may not yet be fully compatible with all frameworks and tools intended to interface with HuggingFace models.
A standalone Pytorch implementation of Zamba2-1.2B may be found here.
Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.