How fast will local models feel on the Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB?

Local LLM speed on the Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB

The Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB has 64 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_MFits9.7 tok/s0.5 s
Qwen 3.8 Flash-NextQ2_KDoesn't fitWon't run—
GLM-5.3 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
Gemma 4 26B A4BQ4_K_MFits66 tok/s0.3 s
GPT-OSS 20BMXFP4Fits79 tok/s0.3 s
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3BQ4_K_MFits89 tok/s0.3 s
Gemma 4 31BQ4_K_MFits8.9 tok/s0.6 s
Qwen 3.5 9BQ4_K_MFits29 tok/s0.4 s
DeepSeek V4 FlashUD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
DeepSeek V4.1 FlashQ2_KDoesn't fitWon't run—
GPT-OSS 120BMXFP4Doesn't fitWon't run—
Llama 3.1 8BQ4_K_MFits45 tok/s0.4 s
Gemma 4 12BQ4_K_MFits23 tok/s0.4 s
GLM-5.3UD-IQ1_SDoesn't fitWon't run—
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3BQ4_K_MFits68 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.