How fast will Qwen 3.5 9B feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB?

Qwen 3.5 9B on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB

Qwen 3.5 9B is a 9.65B-parameter model. At Q4_K_M it needs about 6.4 GB of memory. The MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB has 36 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 26 tokens/sec (22–29), with the first token after 0.4 s for a short prompt. This estimate is projected from the hardware specs; no benchmarks exist yet.

Speed by quantization

QuantizationFile sizeMemoryGenerationFirst tokenSource
Q4_K_M5.7 GBFits26 tok/s0.4 sProjected
Q8_09.5 GBFits15 tok/s0.4 sProjected
FP1617.9 GBFits8.1 tok/s0.4 sProjected

Qwen 3.5 9B on other hardware

Other models on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB

All models on the MacBook Pro M5 Pro 48GB · Qwen 3.5 9B 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.