How fast will local models feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

Local LLM speed on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

The MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB has 128 GB of unified memory and 614 GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is what mostly decides generation speed. Below is the expected speed for each model at the best quantization that fits.

Model	Quantization	Memory	Generation	First token
Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B	Q4_K_M	Fits	19 tok/s	0.4 s
GLM-5.3 Flash	UD-IQ1_S	Fits	60 tok/s	0.4 s
GPT-OSS 20B	MXFP4	Fits	139 tok/s	0.3 s
Gemma 4 26B A4B	Q4_K_M	Fits	87 tok/s	0.3 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B	Q4_K_M	Fits	95 tok/s	0.3 s
Ornith 1.5 35B A3B	Q4_K_M	Fits	160 tok/s	0.3 s
DeepSeek V4 Flash	UD-IQ2_M	Fits	82 tok/s	0.3 s
GPT-OSS 120B	MXFP4	Fits	115 tok/s	0.3 s
Gemma 4 31B	Q4_K_M	Fits	17 tok/s	0.4 s
Llama 3.1 8B	Q4_K_M	Fits	65 tok/s	0.3 s
Qwen 3.5 9B	Q4_K_M	Fits	51 tok/s	0.3 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B	Q4_K_M	Fits	37 tok/s	0.4 s
Ornith 1.5 9B	Q4_K_M	Fits	50 tok/s	0.3 s
Muse Glimmer 30B	Q4_K_M	Fits	15 tok/s	0.4 s
Qwen3 30B A3B	Q4_K_M	Fits	144 tok/s	0.3 s

Other 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.