Fabric Capacity Limits
Here is table that is getting more and more difficult to find as searching for Fabric capacity limits returns results about CU compute units (for the most part meaningless in my opinion). I embed in a searchable format below before it vanishes on Internet. The most important column for semantic modeling is the max memory which denotes the upper limit of memory Fabric will grant a semantic model.
SKU | Max memory (GB)1, 2 | Max concurrent DirectQuery connections (per semantic model)1 | Max DirectQuery parallelism3 | Live connection (per second)1 | Max memory per query (GB)1 | Model refresh parallelism | Direct Lake rows per table (in millions)1, 4 | Max Direct Lake model size on OneLake (GB)1, 4 |
F2 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 300 | 10 |
F4 | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 300 | 10 |
F8 | 3 | 10 | 1 | 3.75 | 1 | 5 | 300 | 10 |
F16 | 5 | 10 | 1 | 7.5 | 2 | 10 | 300 | 20 |
F32 | 10 | 10 | 1 | 15 | 5 | 20 | 300 | 40 |
F64 | 25 | 50 | 4-8 | 30 | 10 | 40 | 1,500 | Unlimited |
F128 | 50 | 75 | 6-12 | 60 | 10 | 80 | 3,000 | Unlimited |
F256 | 100 | 100 | 8-16 | 120 | 10 | 160 | 6,000 | Unlimited |
F512 | 200 | 200 | 10-20 | 240 | 20 | 320 | 12,000 | Unlimited |
F1024 | 400 | 200 | 12-24 | 480 | 40 | 640 | 24,000 | Unlimited |
F2048 | 400 | 200 | 960 | 40 | 1,280 | 24,000 | Unlimited | |
The same page lists another important table that shows the background CPU cores assigned to a capacity. Although bursting, overages, smoothing, and throttling make Fabric capacity compute resources a whole lot more difficult to figure out, think of your capacity as a VM that has that many cores for backend loads, including loads from interactive operations, such as report queries, and loads from background operations, such as dataset refreshes. Not sure what it shows N/A for F2 and F4. If memory serves me right, I’ve previously seen 0.25 cores for F2 and 0.5 cores for F4.
SKU | Capacity Units (CU) | Power BI SKU | Power BI v-cores |
F2 | 2 | N/A | N/A |
F4 | 4 | N/A | N/A |
F8 | 8 | EM1/A1 | 1 |
F16 | 16 | EM2/A2 | 2 |
F32 | 32 | EM3/A3 | 4 |
F64 | 64 | P1/A4 | 8 |
F128 | 128 | P2/A5 | 16 |
F256 | 256 | P3/A6 | 32 |
F5121 | 512 | P4/A7 | 64 |
F10241 | 1,024 | P5/A8 | 128 |
F20481 | 2,048 | N/A | N/A |