I've been thinking about buying a system to run LLMs locally but the price for one that'll run Qwen3.8-27B well is quite offputting to say the least.
What I've been looking at instead is inference providers that use TEE and E2EE to provide cryptographic guarantees that my prompts and responses are only visible to me and the GPU itself.
Despite their docs and assurances of what their guarantees mean, I'm having trouble getting to a point where I'm actually comfortable trusting them with secrets though. Phala for example seems to be E2EE only to the gateway and will then forward prompts to (potentially third party) providers.
Has anyone been down this path and found a provider they feel safe with?
I am really surprised you’re seeing half the generation performance of 3.6 with 3.8 at the same parameter size and quantization (and same prefill performance to boot) - is there just an optimization in the stack somewhere for 3.6 that hasn’t landed yet for 3.8?
Curious if other folks are also surprised by this apparent discrepancy or have a ready explanation.
I suspect this might be due to MTP mispedictions. Either because the 3.8 quantized model weights do not include MTP heads, or as what happened with Ornith-1.5 recently, corrupted MTP heads, or due to a software issue in Ollama.
I remember an article a couple weeks back where someone used an HPE server with two older Xeon E-series CPUs and got reasonable performance by compiling llama with optimal switches for the architecture (memory alignment, page sizes, etc). I was impressed because those Xeons only had AVX2. If you are willing to spend a little more, you can get a slightly newer Xeon with AVX-512 and 4 sockets.
I can't find the post though.
Edit: a quick search from a server refurbisher nearby gives me a dual Xeon Gold 6330 28-core machine with 512GB and a 16GB V100 GPU. The memory is spread across 32 slots, for about £6,470.
I'm encountering the same behavior. I've tried 4-8bit quants and get 14-17 tok/s with one run that achieved 19. I'm eagerly awaiting dflash2 support in Unsloth or LM Studio, as allegedly that should increase throughput to around 30tok/s, which is the baseline for what I consider at least somewhat interactive.
Jealous of the folks with 5090s running ninfer and getting >100tok/s. At those speeds it's a true frontier replacement IMO.
That isn’t right. Use oMLX or something similar to serve the model with internal MTP enabled. You should get at least 40 tok/sec, but I’m not sure what hardware you are using. Dflash will mess up batching, not really worth it. You need to sift through hugging face for the right model though, and some of the MTP models are meant for rapid MLX and not oMLX.
Here's reality, MLX on the software layer will not magically place hardware matrix multiplication units in your GPU cores.
Newer Macs are always just gonna smoke anything earlier than an M5.
Not even sure why this person is trying to get this stuff to run on hardware that wasn't designed for AI?
Everyone is pointing him to newer hardware precisely because you need the newer stuff to get models to be performant. You can go with AMD, NVidia or Apple, but you're gonna be using stuff designed well after the M3 if you want to push >100tok/s.
> Not even sure why this person is trying to get this stuff to run on hardware that wasn't designed for AI?
Posturing/overclaiming like this shades rather than illuminates, there are no worlds in which the "M3...wasn't designed for AI". My M4 Max 64 GB gets the same speed.
I run similar workflows as the author on my 5090. It's really good and reasonably fast at ~90 tok/sec on LM Studio. I haven't tried ninfer yet. The only problem is having to be mindful about the context size. I am jealous of the folks with RTX 6000.
Pretty impressive how the Mac ends up less expensive than the Strix Halo boxes, at least here in Ireland. A 128GB Mac Studio with an M5 Max (the Ultra can only have 96 or 256GB) still costs less than the "GMKtec EVO-X2" or the Nvidia DGX Spark with similar performance. Is it the same in the US?
That's not right. Mac Studio M5 Max 128gb, in Apple Store Ireland, starts from 5,909e (~6,847 USD; tax included). On the other hand, GMKtec Evo-X2 128gb can be currently purchased for 3,299e (~3,822 USD; tax included) from GMKtec online store (free shipping from DE warehouse). It's quite the difference in price.
I figured it's dodgy amazon ie listings. DGX Spark/Asus Ascent GX10 prices are inflated there too. They'll also be happy to sell you an RTX 5090 for 10 grand.
Yea Qwen3.8 wasn't fun to use on my 64GB M4 Max either (better than these numbers though), so my new daily driver is Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit. I recommend giving that a whirl if you're on similar hardware, it's definitely better than Qwen3.6 35b-a3b which was my go-to before.
I tried Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit on a 32G M2-Pro mac mini with pi and OpenCode. I didn’t get very good results coding in Python, Racket, and TypeScript. I have seen several positive comments like yours so I was probably doing something wrong. I amgetting the new 64G mac mini in 4 weeks, and I made a note to try Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit again.
Can you tell more about your experience with Ornith? I've come across it, and the benchmarks on its landing page are unbeleavably good. But it isn't featured on more established benchmarks like ArtificialAnalysis and it's not on OpenRouter, so I wrote it off as scam.
Qwen 3.8 has the same architecture and the same parameter count as Qwen 3.6. Something is not right with the GGUF if it's 2 times slower. The post says "The hybrid attention architecture is new" and says the author's older Llama build from a "couple weeks ago" failed to run Qwen 3.8 because it did not support Qwen35 architecture, but both 3.6 and 3.8 are based on Qwen35 which was released in February 2026. The post doesn't make any sense.
These numbers are a lot lower than I expected from such pricey hardware.
I'll stick with my old AMD datacenter cards thanks. An Instinct MI50 32GB would cost around $550 or so. It has 1TB/s vram bandwidth thanks to its HBM2.
I am also running some old AMD datacenter cards, 2x MI25 in my case. Getting around 30 tokens/second with short context.
Tensor parallel in llama.cpp using RCCL (disabled by default in llama.cpp for some reason). Surprisingly, for these cards HIP is actually faster than Vulkan, unlike the 9070 XT where Vulkan still wins.
ROCm nightlies do actually support these old cards, just not the ROCm stable releases.
How so? I've had no issues running llama.cpp with vulkan compute on my AMD graphics card (9070 XT). llama.cpp exposes an OpenAI API endpoint, which seems to be the lingua franca for AI applications. Does llama.cpp not work with datacenter AMD graphics cards?
That seems like an expensive way to block ads considering traditional ad blockers have been doing that with a tiny fraction of the compute for decades.
The local LLM scene needs a Draw Things equivalent for Mac. Too much fiddle for things that doesn't make sense (Qwen 3.8 27B should be exactly the same speed as Qwen 3.6 27B). It feels like that I am teasing (I am the author of Draw Things) something, because it is.
What you get with Draw Things: 1. Download the app from Mac AppStore; 2. Download the model; 3. Tap "Try recommended settings", have the guarantee that for whatever model it supports, it is the fastest in Mac ecosystem, no need to fiddle.
What you get with local LLM options: 1. Download the inference engine app from the web; 2. Download the model; 3. Configure MTP / DFlash / DSpark whatever; 4. Configure your Pi / OpenCode harness to point to this local LLM inference engine. 5. Configure tools for these harness to be effective. 6. Switching between Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp (DwarfStar4), oMLX, MTPLX, to see which one is fastest for your workload. 7. Again switching between different quants of the same model to see which one is less dumb.
To be honest, llama.cpp probably the closest to deliver on "just use it, don't worry about speed" if your focus is about a pure LLM inference engine.
I’ve casually used Draw Things a couple of times (great tool!), and I did not find it beginner friendly. I remember feeling a lot of doubt, confusion, and frustration.
Am I getting these results because I picked the wrong model? Or I need to improve my prompt? Or the tool just can’t do what I’m trying to do? How current are these model recommendations? Have they been superseded by something newer?
As a true beginner to AI at the time, even the sizes and bits were meaningless to me. And I don’t remember having any context as to what I should be attempting to run on my mac.
So I think you need to include steps 4, 5, and 6 of swapping between different models, quants, and prompts. And step 7 is probably wading through the complicated UI, full of jargon that most people don’t know.
Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that it’s a powerful tool, and the steep learning curve exists because it exposes quite a few power-user features. But for someone graduating from commercial AI image generators that take a text prompt and maybe a choice of couple models, it’s not easy.
Yes, I heard you! I think one of the issue Draw Things inherited is the baggage of supporting too much models. Once you settled on a model, then it is just "try recommended settings", and prompt.
The model part is unfortunate, but luckily converging now.
On the LLM side, hopefully it is not an issue too as long as getting aggressive at pruning models.
FWIW, on my Mac Studio I get ~24-27 tok/s generation between 0-16k context in - that's on the Q6_K GGUF with speculative decoding on. I have spent zero effort optimizing/improving this so far but will be trying the 4 bit MLX next (I've tended to find models drop off somewhat below 6 bit but maybe that isn't the case nowadays).
The cheapest card that will run this model very well is a ln unlocked CMP 170HX. But you can run it on a 3090. I run it on an old spare A6000 Ampere. I think I wouldn’t use anything lower than 60 tok/s though, which you can get with MTP etc. I just use a full vllm stack but some people see a lot of speed with ninfer (there are non 5090 ports).
The large RAM Macs are unusable for inference of dense models as of now. Token generation is too slow.
Apart from learning, I cant see the point of spending that kind of money and energy to get such awfull token generation speed. Assuming memory bandwith is the bottleneck, is it just a matter of time until we start to see hbm4 based chip able to run qwen3.8 for normal people running at more than 500 token / seconds? Is memory speed the only technological bottlenecks that prevent us from having fast local model?
For me, a HUGE benefit to running local models is that my data stays mine, on my computers only.
Even if Google, OpenAI, Anthropic whatever promise not to use it, how sure can I be of that? Data is gold anyway. And we're in the middle of a massive gold rush. And they've already been caught scraping sites they had no business to, and pirating books. Clearly their promises and the law mean nothing to them. It's just something you pay off in a settlement if you get caught, a cost of doing business.
With local models besides the speed you also lose a lot of inference quality but it helps to mitigate that. For example making sure your RAG inputs are properly prepared and categorised so the model can find them easily without having to wade through a bunch of misdirected crap.
For example what I do with my bookmarks and chats (the latter are recorded per day), is before I enter them into a RAG corpus I run a small LLM over it to summarise what's being discussed or what the webpage is about. That really helped retrieval quality, and doing this is a batch task that can run asynchronously so speed is not very relevant. This way I get a lot closer to SOTA-model retrieval quality (like with Office Copilot 365 looking for conversations in Teams).
PS: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft runs something similar on their end :)
But yes the Mac Studio is outrageously priced especially for running such a small model as qwen 27b. For that price you can use something much much cheaper. It only shines for models that are much bigger, because there simply is not much hardware that can address fast 512GB banks.
Which is a regulation constraint on many professions, BTW. Some people simply can't give some data to say, ChatGPT, without comprehensive guarantees written in Sam Altman's blood.
Guarantees that are completely worthless, because these companies will simply pay the fine for breaking their word.
There need to be second order consequences to those who delegate their responsibility to companies that behave like this. They know the contract is worthless, but then proceed to use it as defense for their own gross negligence.
Similar here, except I used Opus 4.8. I don't mind using cloud models to make code as long as I don't put actual private data into the model. And I can't run qwen 27b reliably at the moment, I need a better gpu.
It was pretty easy mode like this tbh, though you do need to know what you're doing. I use it with llama-server and openwebui.
I guess you can get it a lot more click to go with something like LM Studio though but I want to use it on a server and call upon its services from multiple sources.
The M3 Ultra was a lot cheaper for most of its lifetime, and really the main reason for buying it is if you want a lot of unified RAM, to run bigger models than 27B models.
The new M5 Ultra should deliver ~50% faster token generation (1.2TB/s mem bandwidth); and extrapolating from my M5 Max (since the M5 Ultra is literally just 2x Maxes), probably ~3x faster PP.
But I don't think it's fair to look at this only from monetary ROI vs API. With local models, you get privacy and ownership.
I do not trust _any_ API provider with my most personal information; such as for example, all my messages, emails, daily journals spanning a decade+, all my photos and videos, etc. So it unlocks new use cases that I simply don't feel comfortable with via API.
And a personal assistant with ALL my context and data, locally, has been incredibly useful for me :) Zero outages either, zero "overloaded", etc. Nearly-zero refusals too (I don't run abliterated models; thinking prefill has worked for anything I've wanted to do)
I have 2x 3090s and I get 260 tokens/sec peak (110 avg) with Dflash2 and about 1500t/s prefill with a Q4 quant of Qwen 27b. I didn't buy an overpriced Apple product and it performs much better. It's extremely reliable for Agentic coding and I can run 2-3 simultaneous agents with a full ~260k context window.
I realize the price of NVIDIA has gone up but there are plenty of GPU options from others like AMD and Intel with reasonable performance.
A slow AI tasks that can process my self hosted personal journal, my medical history in fasten, my diet and exercise in Mealie and Sparky Fitness to offer insights once a day or even once a week is better than nothing. Because I would never upload that data to any of the AI companies.
I am also seeing slower speeds, roughly the same ballpark, sometimes even lower - 10-11 tok/s on M5 Max. If there is that ONE version (GGUF or MLX) that runs roughly as fast as 3.6 used to run, please let me know.
What would be incredible is the 3.8 35B MoE version too, I can run 3.6 with 60 tok/s which is a really, really nice speed.
There are many, many people who are betraying a lack of facility with these models.
Why is anyone trying to run these on an M3?
I thought it was common knowledge that, if you insist on using Apple, only M5 processors and higher have matrix multiplication units in the cores?
I've seen the same thing with people buying NVidia cards with 16GB of ram and wondering why they aren't getting 100tok/s?
Guys, please, be reasonable. You'll have to get the hardware if you want to run these things fast. If you want to experiment, the slow stuff is fine. But try not to get on HN and ask why your M3 can't get 100tok/s. You're kind of out-ing yourself.
This low-effort slop post is misleading. It suggest that 3.8 is half as fast as 3.6, but this is almost definitely because MTP isn't enabled by default. The two models should perform the same - they are for me. When you get AI to think for you, you lose.
> Qwen3.8 27B (Q4_K_M, 17GB) generates at ~14 tokens/s on my Mac Studio M3 Ultra
>~14 tokens/s
For anyone reading that has never ran local llms, please understand that anything under 100 tok/sec is worthless. You are faster typing stuff into Gemini free version that you get with a google account and copy/pasting it in (and you can easily build browser automation with playwright or any other js runtime to have this available in a chat window)
I get 80 tok/s on the same model, and it's pretty usable. I'm not chatting with it; it's either given a bag of tokens to generate an answer or it's doing some agentic coding.
In agentic scenarios, an LLM has to read far more tokens than it outputs. I think focusing only on the decode speed is somewhat misleading. 14 tok/sec for decode is actually okayish. 93 tok/sec prefill is what's abysmal, my RTX 5090 goes above 2000 tok/sec with 5 bit quants.
I agree that 14t/s is pretty tedious for interactive use, yes. But 50-60tk/s is faster than I can read. 100tk/s is outright fast. Don't forget there is a limit entering content into meatspace.
Also, Gemini may be free but what if I don't want to give all my data to Google? This is precisely why I have a lot of stuff locally.
And will it remain free? How are they going to make back all those trillions of investment?
But yeah I would kinda balk at 14tk/s too that's why I use old datacenter/workstation-class GPUs.
I wouldn't say worthless but once you get used to 100+ tokens / s, it's really a visible slowdown, especially when running multiple agents acting on something more than basic prompt processing.
Still, as you said - for day to day, 50-60 tokens / s is a good baseline.
I've been thinking about buying a system to run LLMs locally but the price for one that'll run Qwen3.8-27B well is quite offputting to say the least.
What I've been looking at instead is inference providers that use TEE and E2EE to provide cryptographic guarantees that my prompts and responses are only visible to me and the GPU itself.
Despite their docs and assurances of what their guarantees mean, I'm having trouble getting to a point where I'm actually comfortable trusting them with secrets though. Phala for example seems to be E2EE only to the gateway and will then forward prompts to (potentially third party) providers.
Has anyone been down this path and found a provider they feel safe with?
I am really surprised you’re seeing half the generation performance of 3.6 with 3.8 at the same parameter size and quantization (and same prefill performance to boot) - is there just an optimization in the stack somewhere for 3.6 that hasn’t landed yet for 3.8?
Curious if other folks are also surprised by this apparent discrepancy or have a ready explanation.
I suspect this might be due to MTP mispedictions. Either because the 3.8 quantized model weights do not include MTP heads, or as what happened with Ornith-1.5 recently, corrupted MTP heads, or due to a software issue in Ollama.
I remember an article a couple weeks back where someone used an HPE server with two older Xeon E-series CPUs and got reasonable performance by compiling llama with optimal switches for the architecture (memory alignment, page sizes, etc). I was impressed because those Xeons only had AVX2. If you are willing to spend a little more, you can get a slightly newer Xeon with AVX-512 and 4 sockets.
I can't find the post though.
Edit: a quick search from a server refurbisher nearby gives me a dual Xeon Gold 6330 28-core machine with 512GB and a 16GB V100 GPU. The memory is spread across 32 slots, for about £6,470.
I'm encountering the same behavior. I've tried 4-8bit quants and get 14-17 tok/s with one run that achieved 19. I'm eagerly awaiting dflash2 support in Unsloth or LM Studio, as allegedly that should increase throughput to around 30tok/s, which is the baseline for what I consider at least somewhat interactive.
Jealous of the folks with 5090s running ninfer and getting >100tok/s. At those speeds it's a true frontier replacement IMO.
That isn’t right. Use oMLX or something similar to serve the model with internal MTP enabled. You should get at least 40 tok/sec, but I’m not sure what hardware you are using. Dflash will mess up batching, not really worth it. You need to sift through hugging face for the right model though, and some of the MTP models are meant for rapid MLX and not oMLX.
I was just trying that yesterday on my M4 Max with the 6bit quant. It started at 40 tps but dropped to 10 once the context loaded up.
Well, yes and no.
The author has an M3.
Here's reality, MLX on the software layer will not magically place hardware matrix multiplication units in your GPU cores.
Newer Macs are always just gonna smoke anything earlier than an M5.
Not even sure why this person is trying to get this stuff to run on hardware that wasn't designed for AI?
Everyone is pointing him to newer hardware precisely because you need the newer stuff to get models to be performant. You can go with AMD, NVidia or Apple, but you're gonna be using stuff designed well after the M3 if you want to push >100tok/s.
> Not even sure why this person is trying to get this stuff to run on hardware that wasn't designed for AI?
Posturing/overclaiming like this shades rather than illuminates, there are no worlds in which the "M3...wasn't designed for AI". My M4 Max 64 GB gets the same speed.
I run similar workflows as the author on my 5090. It's really good and reasonably fast at ~90 tok/sec on LM Studio. I haven't tried ninfer yet. The only problem is having to be mindful about the context size. I am jealous of the folks with RTX 6000.
Pretty impressive how the Mac ends up less expensive than the Strix Halo boxes, at least here in Ireland. A 128GB Mac Studio with an M5 Max (the Ultra can only have 96 or 256GB) still costs less than the "GMKtec EVO-X2" or the Nvidia DGX Spark with similar performance. Is it the same in the US?
That's not right. Mac Studio M5 Max 128gb, in Apple Store Ireland, starts from 5,909e (~6,847 USD; tax included). On the other hand, GMKtec Evo-X2 128gb can be currently purchased for 3,299e (~3,822 USD; tax included) from GMKtec online store (free shipping from DE warehouse). It's quite the difference in price.
It’s the price I got from amazon.ie
I figured it's dodgy amazon ie listings. DGX Spark/Asus Ascent GX10 prices are inflated there too. They'll also be happy to sell you an RTX 5090 for 10 grand.
That would be such a sizeable disconnect that you might do some arbitrage.
Current prices in USD:
128 GB 1 TB M5 Mac Studio: $5399
128 GB 1 TB GMKtec EVO-X2: $3499
128 GB 1 TB Framework Desktop: $3748
Yea Qwen3.8 wasn't fun to use on my 64GB M4 Max either (better than these numbers though), so my new daily driver is Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit. I recommend giving that a whirl if you're on similar hardware, it's definitely better than Qwen3.6 35b-a3b which was my go-to before.
https://huggingface.co/ornith-ai/Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B
I tried Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit on a 32G M2-Pro mac mini with pi and OpenCode. I didn’t get very good results coding in Python, Racket, and TypeScript. I have seen several positive comments like yours so I was probably doing something wrong. I amgetting the new 64G mac mini in 4 weeks, and I made a note to try Ornith-1.5-35B-A3B-MLX-4bit again.
Can you tell more about your experience with Ornith? I've come across it, and the benchmarks on its landing page are unbeleavably good. But it isn't featured on more established benchmarks like ArtificialAnalysis and it's not on OpenRouter, so I wrote it off as scam.
Qwen 3.8 has the same architecture and the same parameter count as Qwen 3.6. Something is not right with the GGUF if it's 2 times slower. The post says "The hybrid attention architecture is new" and says the author's older Llama build from a "couple weeks ago" failed to run Qwen 3.8 because it did not support Qwen35 architecture, but both 3.6 and 3.8 are based on Qwen35 which was released in February 2026. The post doesn't make any sense.
These numbers are a lot lower than I expected from such pricey hardware.
I'll stick with my old AMD datacenter cards thanks. An Instinct MI50 32GB would cost around $550 or so. It has 1TB/s vram bandwidth thanks to its HBM2.
I am also running some old AMD datacenter cards, 2x MI25 in my case. Getting around 30 tokens/second with short context.
Tensor parallel in llama.cpp using RCCL (disabled by default in llama.cpp for some reason). Surprisingly, for these cards HIP is actually faster than Vulkan, unlike the 9070 XT where Vulkan still wins.
ROCm nightlies do actually support these old cards, just not the ROCm stable releases.
It's a software issue.
How so? I've had no issues running llama.cpp with vulkan compute on my AMD graphics card (9070 XT). llama.cpp exposes an OpenAI API endpoint, which seems to be the lingua franca for AI applications. Does llama.cpp not work with datacenter AMD graphics cards?
any numbers to share? also, what inference engine do you use and with which api?
AI is a killer adblocker ! imagine connecting it to instagram and curating all the images that you actually care about removing all ads !
That seems like an expensive way to block ads considering traditional ad blockers have been doing that with a tiny fraction of the compute for decades.
The local LLM scene needs a Draw Things equivalent for Mac. Too much fiddle for things that doesn't make sense (Qwen 3.8 27B should be exactly the same speed as Qwen 3.6 27B). It feels like that I am teasing (I am the author of Draw Things) something, because it is.
I’ve never personally used it, but isn’t that what LM Studio is positioned as? From what I can gather, it seems extremely beginner-friendly.
What you get with Draw Things: 1. Download the app from Mac AppStore; 2. Download the model; 3. Tap "Try recommended settings", have the guarantee that for whatever model it supports, it is the fastest in Mac ecosystem, no need to fiddle.
What you get with local LLM options: 1. Download the inference engine app from the web; 2. Download the model; 3. Configure MTP / DFlash / DSpark whatever; 4. Configure your Pi / OpenCode harness to point to this local LLM inference engine. 5. Configure tools for these harness to be effective. 6. Switching between Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp (DwarfStar4), oMLX, MTPLX, to see which one is fastest for your workload. 7. Again switching between different quants of the same model to see which one is less dumb.
To be honest, llama.cpp probably the closest to deliver on "just use it, don't worry about speed" if your focus is about a pure LLM inference engine.
I’ve casually used Draw Things a couple of times (great tool!), and I did not find it beginner friendly. I remember feeling a lot of doubt, confusion, and frustration.
Am I getting these results because I picked the wrong model? Or I need to improve my prompt? Or the tool just can’t do what I’m trying to do? How current are these model recommendations? Have they been superseded by something newer?
As a true beginner to AI at the time, even the sizes and bits were meaningless to me. And I don’t remember having any context as to what I should be attempting to run on my mac.
So I think you need to include steps 4, 5, and 6 of swapping between different models, quants, and prompts. And step 7 is probably wading through the complicated UI, full of jargon that most people don’t know.
Don’t get me wrong, I recognize that it’s a powerful tool, and the steep learning curve exists because it exposes quite a few power-user features. But for someone graduating from commercial AI image generators that take a text prompt and maybe a choice of couple models, it’s not easy.
Yes, I heard you! I think one of the issue Draw Things inherited is the baggage of supporting too much models. Once you settled on a model, then it is just "try recommended settings", and prompt.
The model part is unfortunate, but luckily converging now.
On the LLM side, hopefully it is not an issue too as long as getting aggressive at pruning models.
Or you can just ask Sol to do all that for you, and do split testing, to find best performance.
I would like to see "guarantee" for that app. You get full refound and it is free, right?
Ollama was/is this but they pulled a heel turn...
FWIW, on my Mac Studio I get ~24-27 tok/s generation between 0-16k context in - that's on the Q6_K GGUF with speculative decoding on. I have spent zero effort optimizing/improving this so far but will be trying the 4 bit MLX next (I've tended to find models drop off somewhat below 6 bit but maybe that isn't the case nowadays).
The cheapest card that will run this model very well is a ln unlocked CMP 170HX. But you can run it on a 3090. I run it on an old spare A6000 Ampere. I think I wouldn’t use anything lower than 60 tok/s though, which you can get with MTP etc. I just use a full vllm stack but some people see a lot of speed with ninfer (there are non 5090 ports).
The large RAM Macs are unusable for inference of dense models as of now. Token generation is too slow.
Apart from learning, I cant see the point of spending that kind of money and energy to get such awfull token generation speed. Assuming memory bandwith is the bottleneck, is it just a matter of time until we start to see hbm4 based chip able to run qwen3.8 for normal people running at more than 500 token / seconds? Is memory speed the only technological bottlenecks that prevent us from having fast local model?
For me, a HUGE benefit to running local models is that my data stays mine, on my computers only.
Even if Google, OpenAI, Anthropic whatever promise not to use it, how sure can I be of that? Data is gold anyway. And we're in the middle of a massive gold rush. And they've already been caught scraping sites they had no business to, and pirating books. Clearly their promises and the law mean nothing to them. It's just something you pay off in a settlement if you get caught, a cost of doing business.
With local models besides the speed you also lose a lot of inference quality but it helps to mitigate that. For example making sure your RAG inputs are properly prepared and categorised so the model can find them easily without having to wade through a bunch of misdirected crap.
For example what I do with my bookmarks and chats (the latter are recorded per day), is before I enter them into a RAG corpus I run a small LLM over it to summarise what's being discussed or what the webpage is about. That really helped retrieval quality, and doing this is a batch task that can run asynchronously so speed is not very relevant. This way I get a lot closer to SOTA-model retrieval quality (like with Office Copilot 365 looking for conversations in Teams).
PS: I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft runs something similar on their end :)
But yes the Mac Studio is outrageously priced especially for running such a small model as qwen 27b. For that price you can use something much much cheaper. It only shines for models that are much bigger, because there simply is not much hardware that can address fast 512GB banks.
> my data stays mine, on my computers only.
Which is a regulation constraint on many professions, BTW. Some people simply can't give some data to say, ChatGPT, without comprehensive guarantees written in Sam Altman's blood.
Guarantees that are completely worthless, because these companies will simply pay the fine for breaking their word.
There need to be second order consequences to those who delegate their responsibility to companies that behave like this. They know the contract is worthless, but then proceed to use it as defense for their own gross negligence.
Is there an “easy button” software for macos for making the RAG corpus you mention? Ideally installed from homebrew?
I just used Qwen3.8 & Deepseek v4 flash to make it for me.
Similar here, except I used Opus 4.8. I don't mind using cloud models to make code as long as I don't put actual private data into the model. And I can't run qwen 27b reliably at the moment, I need a better gpu.
It was pretty easy mode like this tbh, though you do need to know what you're doing. I use it with llama-server and openwebui.
I guess you can get it a lot more click to go with something like LM Studio though but I want to use it on a server and call upon its services from multiple sources.
The M3 Ultra was a lot cheaper for most of its lifetime, and really the main reason for buying it is if you want a lot of unified RAM, to run bigger models than 27B models.
The new M5 Ultra should deliver ~50% faster token generation (1.2TB/s mem bandwidth); and extrapolating from my M5 Max (since the M5 Ultra is literally just 2x Maxes), probably ~3x faster PP.
But I don't think it's fair to look at this only from monetary ROI vs API. With local models, you get privacy and ownership.
I do not trust _any_ API provider with my most personal information; such as for example, all my messages, emails, daily journals spanning a decade+, all my photos and videos, etc. So it unlocks new use cases that I simply don't feel comfortable with via API.
And a personal assistant with ALL my context and data, locally, has been incredibly useful for me :) Zero outages either, zero "overloaded", etc. Nearly-zero refusals too (I don't run abliterated models; thinking prefill has worked for anything I've wanted to do)
I have 2x 3090s and I get 260 tokens/sec peak (110 avg) with Dflash2 and about 1500t/s prefill with a Q4 quant of Qwen 27b. I didn't buy an overpriced Apple product and it performs much better. It's extremely reliable for Agentic coding and I can run 2-3 simultaneous agents with a full ~260k context window.
I realize the price of NVIDIA has gone up but there are plenty of GPU options from others like AMD and Intel with reasonable performance.
A slow AI tasks that can process my self hosted personal journal, my medical history in fasten, my diet and exercise in Mealie and Sparky Fitness to offer insights once a day or even once a week is better than nothing. Because I would never upload that data to any of the AI companies.
I am also seeing slower speeds, roughly the same ballpark, sometimes even lower - 10-11 tok/s on M5 Max. If there is that ONE version (GGUF or MLX) that runs roughly as fast as 3.6 used to run, please let me know.
What would be incredible is the 3.8 35B MoE version too, I can run 3.6 with 60 tok/s which is a really, really nice speed.
Ollama? Running a q1 quant? I don't think the writer knows what the are doing here to be honest.
You will get better information cruising r/localllama for about 10 minutes.
This is a problem that Hugging Face could easily help solve.
Crawling through Reddit or forums to find the right incantation to run a model is frustrating.
There are many, many people who are betraying a lack of facility with these models.
Why is anyone trying to run these on an M3?
I thought it was common knowledge that, if you insist on using Apple, only M5 processors and higher have matrix multiplication units in the cores?
I've seen the same thing with people buying NVidia cards with 16GB of ram and wondering why they aren't getting 100tok/s?
Guys, please, be reasonable. You'll have to get the hardware if you want to run these things fast. If you want to experiment, the slow stuff is fine. But try not to get on HN and ask why your M3 can't get 100tok/s. You're kind of out-ing yourself.
Peaks at over 300 tok/s on my 5090 with Dflash2. At maximum context (252000 or so) still get 60 tok/s.
is it really worth to run urself? the watts drsin and that 100% gpu usage
This low-effort slop post is misleading. It suggest that 3.8 is half as fast as 3.6, but this is almost definitely because MTP isn't enabled by default. The two models should perform the same - they are for me. When you get AI to think for you, you lose.
I'm running the 5 bit quant on a 3060 12G. Get a handful of tokens/s. Prompts take 10-20 minutes to complete but it works.
Slop; all those LocalLlama threads "you" read had #s too. And Q1 quant? Why? You have the memory...
> Qwen3.8 27B (Q4_K_M, 17GB) generates at ~14 tokens/s on my Mac Studio M3 Ultra
>~14 tokens/s
For anyone reading that has never ran local llms, please understand that anything under 100 tok/sec is worthless. You are faster typing stuff into Gemini free version that you get with a google account and copy/pasting it in (and you can easily build browser automation with playwright or any other js runtime to have this available in a chat window)
I get 80 tok/s on the same model, and it's pretty usable. I'm not chatting with it; it's either given a bag of tokens to generate an answer or it's doing some agentic coding.
https://openrouter.ai/anthropic/claude-opus-5 is it worthless because its 65 tps?
re: gemini
https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-3.7-flash worthless as well?
That being said, 14 tok/s is pretty slow.
In agentic scenarios, an LLM has to read far more tokens than it outputs. I think focusing only on the decode speed is somewhat misleading. 14 tok/sec for decode is actually okayish. 93 tok/sec prefill is what's abysmal, my RTX 5090 goes above 2000 tok/sec with 5 bit quants.
What? Below 100tk/s is worthless?
I agree that 14t/s is pretty tedious for interactive use, yes. But 50-60tk/s is faster than I can read. 100tk/s is outright fast. Don't forget there is a limit entering content into meatspace.
Also, Gemini may be free but what if I don't want to give all my data to Google? This is precisely why I have a lot of stuff locally.
And will it remain free? How are they going to make back all those trillions of investment?
But yeah I would kinda balk at 14tk/s too that's why I use old datacenter/workstation-class GPUs.
I wouldn't say worthless but once you get used to 100+ tokens / s, it's really a visible slowdown, especially when running multiple agents acting on something more than basic prompt processing.
Still, as you said - for day to day, 50-60 tokens / s is a good baseline.
I mean, if you don't care about your inputs being trained on, you can just use one of the many free models on openrouter.