How fast will Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B feel on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)?

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B is a 31.58B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3B active per token). At Q4_K_M it needs about 26.0 GB of memory. The CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) has 89 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 25 tokens/sec (22–29), 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	25.3 GB	Fits	25 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived
Q8_0	35.0 GB	Fits	18 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived
FP16	65.8 GB	Fits	9.7 tok/s	0.4 s	Derived

Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B on other hardware

H200 141GB (cloud) · 871 tok/s at Q4_K_M
H100 80GB (cloud) · 608 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5090 32GB · 385 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 96GB · 325 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Instinct MI50 32GB · 274 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 256GB · 267 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M5 Ultra 512GB · 240 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · 182 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB · 173 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA Tesla V100 32GB · 163 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · 137 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac Studio M4 Max 128GB · 121 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XTX 24GB · 96 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 4090 24GB · 85 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3090 24GB · 83 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 192GB (Gorgon Halo) · 73 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Mac mini M5 Pro 64GB · 68 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB · 68 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 128GB (Strix Halo) · 64 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 7900 XT 20GB · 57 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX Spark N1X 128GB (laptop) · 54 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Intel Arc Pro B70 32GB · 53 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA DGX Spark 128GB · 50 tok/s at Q4_K_M
AMD RX 9070 XT 16GB · 41 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5080 16GB · 41 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5070 Ti 16GB · 40 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti 16GB · 35 tok/s at Q4_K_M
NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB · 29 tok/s at Q4_K_M
MacBook M4 Pro 24GB · won't run

Other models on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5)

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B · 3.6 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.8 Flash-Next · 22 tok/s at GSQ-RCO-IQ3_S
GLM-5.3 Flash · 13 tok/s at UD-IQ1_S
Gemma 4 26B A4B · 24 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GPT-OSS 20B · 29 tok/s at MXFP4
Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B · 33 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Gemma 4 31B · 3.3 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Qwen 3.5 9B · 11 tok/s at Q4_K_M
DeepSeek V4 Flash · 16 tok/s at UD-IQ1_M
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash · won't run
GPT-OSS 120B · 22 tok/s at MXFP4
Llama 3.1 8B · 10 tok/s at Q4_K_M
Gemma 4 12B · 8.5 tok/s at Q4_K_M
GLM-5.3 · won't run

All models on the CPU-only (Ryzen 9 9950X, 96GB DDR5) · Nemotron 3.5 Lightning 30B A3B 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.