Baidu ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-GGUF Open-source Model - Improve Operating Efficiency and Performance in Multi-hardware Environments

Baidu ERNIE 4.5 21B A3B PT GGUF

Developed by bartowski

A quantized version of the Baidu ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT model, quantized through llama.cpp to improve the operating efficiency and performance in different hardware environments.

Large Language Model #Large model quantization #Chinese optimization #Efficient inference

Downloads 1,600

Release Time : 6/30/2025

Model Overview

This model is a quantized version of Baidu ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT, aiming to optimize the model's operating efficiency on various hardware through quantization technology while maintaining high model performance.

Model Features

Efficient quantization

Use llama.cpp for quantization processing, supporting multiple quantization types from high precision to low precision to meet different hardware requirements.

Hardware compatibility

Support running on platforms such as LM Studio and llama.cpp, adapting to various hardware environments.

Optimization of embedding and output weights

Some quantized models have specially processed the embedding and output weights, using Q8_0 quantization to improve model performance.

Online repackaging

Support online repackaging of weights to optimize the operating efficiency on ARM and AVX hardware.

Model Capabilities

Text generation

Efficient inference

Multi-hardware adaptation

Use Cases

Text generation

Content creation

Used to generate high-quality articles, stories, or other text content.

Generate smooth and coherent text

Dialogue system

Used to build intelligent dialogue robots, providing natural language interaction capabilities.

Achieve natural and smooth dialogue

Research and development

Model quantization research

Used to study the impact of different quantization methods on model performance.

Provide multiple quantization options for easy comparison and analysis

🚀 Llamacpp imatrix Quantizations of ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT by baidu

This project provides quantized versions of the baidu/ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT model using llama.cpp, offering various options for different performance and quality requirements.

🚀 Quick Start

Using llama.cpp release b5924 for quantization.
Original model: baidu/ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT
All quants are made using the imatrix option with the dataset from here.
You can run these quantized models in LM Studio or directly with llama.cpp, or any other llama.cpp based project.

✨ Features

Quantization Details

Some of these quants (Q3_K_XL, Q4_K_L etc) use the standard quantization method, with the embeddings and output weights quantized to Q8_0 instead of the normal default.

ARM/AVX Optimization

Previously, Q4_0_4_4/4_8/8_8 were used, with weights interleaved in memory to improve performance on ARM and AVX machines. Now, "online repacking" for weights is available. Details can be found in this PR. If you use Q4_0 and your hardware would benefit from repacking weights, it will be done automatically on the fly.
As of llama.cpp build b4282, Q4_0_X_X files cannot be run, and Q4_0 should be used instead.
Additionally, for slightly better quality, you can use IQ4_NL thanks to this PR, which also repacks the weights for ARM (only the 4_4 for now). The loading time may be slower, but it will result in an overall speed increase.

📦 Installation

Downloading using huggingface-cli

Click to view download instructions

First, make sure you have hugginface-cli installed:

pip install -U "huggingface_hub[cli]"

Then, you can target the specific file you want:

huggingface-cli download bartowski/baidu_ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-GGUF --include "baidu_ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_K_M.gguf" --local-dir ./

If the model is bigger than 50GB, it will have been split into multiple files. In order to download them all to a local folder, run:

huggingface-cli download bartowski/baidu_ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-GGUF --include "baidu_ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q8_0/*" --local-dir ./

You can either specify a new local-dir (baidu_ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q8_0) or download them all in place (./)

📚 Documentation

Prompt format

No prompt format found, check the original model page.

Download a file

Filename	Quant type	File Size	Split	Description
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-bf16.gguf	bf16	43.66GB	false	Full BF16 weights.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q8_0.gguf	Q8_0	23.21GB	false	Extremely high quality, generally unneeded but max available quant.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q6_K_L.gguf	Q6_K_L	18.15GB	false	Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Very high quality, near perfect, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q6_K.gguf	Q6_K	18.08GB	false	Very high quality, near perfect, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q5_K_L.gguf	Q5_K_L	15.82GB	false	Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. High quality, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q5_K_M.gguf	Q5_K_M	15.75GB	false	High quality, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q5_K_S.gguf	Q5_K_S	15.23GB	false	High quality, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_1.gguf	Q4_1	13.88GB	false	Legacy format, similar performance to Q4_K_S but with improved tokens/watt on Apple silicon.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_K_L.gguf	Q4_K_L	13.56GB	false	Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Good quality, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_K_M.gguf	Q4_K_M	13.50GB	false	Good quality, default size for most use cases, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_K_S.gguf	Q4_K_S	13.01GB	false	Slightly lower quality with more space savings, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q4_0.gguf	Q4_0	12.78GB	false	Legacy format, offers online repacking for ARM and AVX CPU inference.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ4_NL.gguf	IQ4_NL	12.60GB	false	Similar to IQ4_XS, but slightly larger. Offers online repacking for ARM CPU inference.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ4_XS.gguf	IQ4_XS	11.96GB	false	Decent quality, smaller than Q4_K_S with similar performance, recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q3_K_XL.gguf	Q3_K_XL	10.73GB	false	Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Lower quality but usable, good for low RAM availability.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q3_K_L.gguf	Q3_K_L	10.66GB	false	Lower quality but usable, good for low RAM availability.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q3_K_M.gguf	Q3_K_M	10.30GB	false	Low quality.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ3_M.gguf	IQ3_M	10.29GB	false	Medium-low quality, new method with decent performance comparable to Q3_K_M.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q3_K_S.gguf	Q3_K_S	9.85GB	false	Low quality, not recommended.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ3_XS.gguf	IQ3_XS	9.35GB	false	Lower quality, new method with decent performance, slightly better than Q3_K_S.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ3_XXS.gguf	IQ3_XXS	8.99GB	false	Lower quality, new method with decent performance, comparable to Q3 quants.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q2_K_L.gguf	Q2_K_L	8.16GB	false	Uses Q8_0 for embed and output weights. Very low quality but surprisingly usable.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-Q2_K.gguf	Q2_K	8.09GB	false	Very low quality but surprisingly usable.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ2_M.gguf	IQ2_M	7.16GB	false	Relatively low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be surprisingly usable.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ2_S.gguf	IQ2_S	6.37GB	false	Low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be usable.
ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-PT-IQ2_XS.gguf	IQ2_XS	6.35GB	false	Low quality, uses SOTA techniques to be usable.

Which file should I choose?

Click here for details

A great write up with charts showing various performances is provided by Artefact2 here

The first thing to figure out is how big a model you can run. To do this, you'll need to figure out how much RAM and/or VRAM you have.

If you want your model running as FAST as possible, you'll want to fit the whole thing on your GPU's VRAM. Aim for a quant with a file size 1-2GB smaller than your GPU's total VRAM.

If you want the absolute maximum quality, add both your system RAM and your GPU's VRAM together, then similarly grab a quant with a file size 1-2GB Smaller than that total.

Next, you'll need to decide if you want to use an 'I-quant' or a 'K-quant'.

If you don't want to think too much, grab one of the K-quants. These are in format 'QX_K_X', like Q5_K_M.

If you want to get more into the weeds, you can check out this extremely useful feature chart:

llama.cpp feature matrix

But basically, if you're aiming for below Q4, and you're running cuBLAS (Nvidia) or rocBLAS (AMD), you should look towards the I-quants. These are in format IQX_X, like IQ3_M. These are newer and offer better performance for their size.

These I-quants can also be used on CPU, but will be slower than their K-quant equivalent, so speed vs performance is a tradeoff you'll have to decide.

🔧 Technical Details

Embed/output weights

Some of these quants (Q3_K_XL, Q4_K_L etc) are the standard quantization method with the embeddings and output weights quantized to Q8_0 instead of what they would normally default to.

ARM/AVX information

Previously, you would download Q4_0_4_4/4_8/8_8, and these would have their weights interleaved in memory in order to improve performance on ARM and AVX machines by loading up more data in one pass.

Now, however, there is something called "online repacking" for weights. details in this PR. If you use Q4_0 and your hardware would benefit from repacking weights, it will do it automatically on the fly.

As of llama.cpp build b4282 you will not be able to run the Q4_0_X_X files and will instead need to use Q4_0.

Additionally, if you want to get slightly better quality for , you can use IQ4_NL thanks to this PR which will also repack the weights for ARM, though only the 4_4 for now. The loading time may be slower but it will result in an overall speed incrase.

Click to view Q4_0_X_X information (deprecated)

I'm keeping this section to show the potential theoretical uplift in performance from using the Q4_0 with online repacking.

Click to view benchmarks on an AVX2 system (EPYC7702)

model	size	params	backend	threads	test	t/s	% (vs Q4_0)
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp512	204.03 ± 1.03	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp1024	282.92 ± 0.19	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp2048	259.49 ± 0.44	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg128	39.12 ± 0.27	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg256	39.31 ± 0.69	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0	1.70 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg512	40.52 ± 0.03	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp512	301.02 ± 1.74	147%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp1024	287.23 ± 0.20	101%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp2048	262.77 ± 1.81	101%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg128	18.80 ± 0.99	48%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg256	24.46 ± 3.04	83%
qwen2 3B Q4_K_M	1.79 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg512	36.32 ± 3.59	90%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp512	271.71 ± 3.53	133%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp1024	279.86 ± 45.63	100%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	pp2048	320.77 ± 5.00	124%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg128	43.51 ± 0.05	111%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg256	43.35 ± 0.09	110%
qwen2 3B Q4_0_8_8	1.69 GiB	3.09 B	CPU	64	tg512	42.60 ± 0.31	105%

Q4_0_8_8 offers a nice bump to prompt processing and a small bump to text generation

📄 License

No license information provided.

Credits

Thank you kalomaze and Dampf for assistance in creating the imatrix calibration dataset.

Thank you ZeroWw for the inspiration to experiment with embed/output.

Thank you to LM Studio for sponsoring my work.

Want to support my work? Visit my ko-fi page here: https://ko-fi.com/bartowski

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