bge-small-en-v1.5 Memory at each precision, the licence in plain words, and where it fits.
Short answer. bge-small-en-v1.5 needs about 1.5 GB of memory at 4-bit, 1.5 GB at 8-bit and 1.6 GB at full 16-bit precision, including runtime overhead. It has about 33 million parameters and a 512-token context window. Licence in short: commercial use allowed. By memory alone, on ANVE’s launch configurations: ANVE One fits at BF16, ANVE Office fits at BF16, ANVE Office Pro (GPU) fits at BF16. These are estimates from its published size, not benchmarks.
01
What it is
bge-small-en-v1.5 is an embedding model that turns text into vectors for document search, published by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) on Hugging Face on 12 September 2023. It has about 33 million parameters and a configured context window of 512 tokens.
Its card lists the licence as MIT. In short, the licence allows commercial use, modification and redistribution as long as the copyright notice is kept.
Hugging Face counted about 62,278,766 downloads of it in the 30 days before we checked (7 Oct 2026), and 601 people have liked it there.
02
How much memory it needs
The arithmetic: parameters × bits per weight ÷ 8 gives the weights, plus about 1.5 GB for the runtime. These are planning estimates, not measurements.
Inputs are short, so working memory is small next to the weights.
Precision
Weights
Total, estimated
BF16 (full precision)
0.07 GB
1.6 GB
8-bit (Q8_0)
0.04 GB
1.5 GB
4-bit (Q4_K)
0.02 GB
1.5 GB
03
Architecture at a glance
Setting
Value in config.json
Architecture class
BertModel
Model type
bert
Layers
12
Hidden size
384
Attention heads
12
Head size
32
Vocabulary
30,522
Configured context
512
Stored precision
float32
04
Will it fit on ANVE?
Arithmetic against the launch specification, not a test: about three quarters of ANVE One’s 64 GB of unified memory for the model (as AMD’s Variable Graphics Memory allows), and the 24 GB on the graphics card in ANVE Office and ANVE Office Pro, which keep the rest of the stack in 64 GB and 128 GB of system memory. ANVE’s tested default is Qwen 3.8 27B; this model is not yet validated on ANVE.
Configuration (at launch)
Memory for the model
Verdict
ANVE One
about 48 GB of 64 GB unified memory
fits at BF16
ANVE Office
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition
fits at BF16
ANVE Office Pro (GPU)
24 GB on the RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell
fits at BF16
05
What an office would use it for
For an office, embeddings are what make "find the clause about late fees" work across thousands of documents. The model is small, so it runs beside the main language model without crowding it.
06
Variants with the same size
bge-base-en-v1.5: a variant with the same size and memory needs (same parameter count, so the memory figures above apply).
e5-base-v2: a variant with the same size and memory needs (same parameter count, so the memory figures above apply).
07
Similar models to compare
granite-embedding-small-english-r2 (0.0B parameters, about 1.5 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
embeddinggemma-300m (0.3B parameters, about 1.7 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed, with conditions)
Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B (0.6B parameters, about 1.8 GB at 4-bit before context; commercial use allowed)
08
Questions people ask
How much memory does bge-small-en-v1.5 need?
About 1.5 GB at 4-bit, 1.5 GB at 8-bit and 1.6 GB at full 16-bit precision, including about 1.5 GB of runtime overhead. These are estimates from its parameter count.
Can bge-small-en-v1.5 run on a 24 GB graphics card?
Yes, at BF16 by this estimate, with room left for context.
Is bge-small-en-v1.5 free for commercial use?
Its card lists MIT, which allows commercial use, modification and redistribution as long as the copyright notice is kept. Read the licence itself before relying on this summary; it is not legal advice.
What is bge-small-en-v1.5’s context window?
Its configuration sets 512 tokens. Longer contexts need more memory for the KV cache, so the practical limit on a given machine can be lower.
09
What is not real yet
No sealed ANVE unit exists; every image of the appliance on this site is a labelled render. The software runs today on a development machine. No customers yet, no certifications, no delivery date, and the final price is not announced.
Reservations are ₹999 in India or US$12 elsewhere, refundable in full until you confirm an order in writing (terms). Offices that cannot use cloud AI can apply to be one of ten design partners.
