How fast will Gemma 4 12B feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

Gemma 4 12B on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

Gemma 4 12B is a 11.96B-parameter model. At Q4_K_M it needs about 7.9 GB of memory. The MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB has 96 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 46 tokens/sec (26–66), with the first token after 0.4 s for a short prompt. This estimate is interpolated from benchmarks of similar setups.

Speed by quantization

Quantization	File size	Memory	Generation	First token	Source
Q4_K_M	7.1 GB	Fits	46 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived
Q8_0	12.7 GB	Fits	26 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived
FP16	23.8 GB	Fits	14 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived

Gemma 4 12B on other hardware

H200 141GB (cloud) · 294 tok/s at Q4_K_M
H100 80GB (cloud) · 205 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB · 148 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB · 110 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB · 102 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Instinct MI50 32GB · 92 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256GB · 90 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XTX 24GB · 87 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB · 85 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB · 81 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XT 20GB · 72 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · 61 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB · 59 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB · 58 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB · 58 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB · 55 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 16GB · 55 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB · 41 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 27 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 192GB (Gorgon Halo) · 25 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB (Strix Halo) · 25 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB · 23 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB · 23 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · 22 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M4 Pro 24GB · 20 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X 128GB (laptop) · 18 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB · 18 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA DGX Spark 128GB · 17 tok/s at Q4_K_M
CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) · 8.5 tok/s at Q4_K_M

Other models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B · 19 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next · 107 tok/s at Q3_K_M
GLM-5.3 Flash · 60 tok/s at UD-IQ1_S
Gemma 4 26B A4B · 87 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GPT-OSS 20B · 139 tok/s at MXFP4
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B · 95 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Gemma 4 31B · 18 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.5 9B · 58 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek V4 Flash · 83 tok/s at UD-IQ2_M
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · won't run
GPT-OSS 120B · 118 tok/s at MXFP4
Llama 3.1 8B · 67 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GLM-5.3 · won't run
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B · 137 tok/s at Q4_K_M

All models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · Gemma 4 12B on all hardware

Estimates for a short prompt on a single device. Measured numbers come from community benchmarks (r/LocalLLaMA, localscore.ai and more); others are derived from similar setups or projected from specs. Open source on GitHub.