How fast will local models feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB?

Local LLM speed on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB

The MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB has 48 GB of unified memory and 307 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.

ModelQuantizationMemoryGenerationFirst token
Qwen 3.6/3.8 27BQ4_K_MFits9.5 tok/s0.5 s
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits82 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits77 tok/s0.3 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits86 tok/s0.3 s
Ornith 1.5 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits80 tok/s0.3 s
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Doesn't fitWon't run—
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MFits8.7 tok/s0.5 s
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits32 tok/s0.4 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits26 tok/s0.4 s
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14BQ4_K_MFits24 tok/s0.5 s
Ornith 1.5 9BQ4_K_MFits25 tok/s0.4 s
Muse Glimmer 30BQ4_K_MFits7.3 tok/s0.6 s
Qwen3 30B A3BQ4_K_MFits72 tok/s0.3 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.