How fast will Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B is a 27.78B-parameter model. At Q4_K_M it needs about 17.6 GB of memory. The MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB has 96 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 19 tokens/sec (11–27), with the first token after 0.4 s for a short prompt. This estimate is interpolated from benchmarks of similar setups.

Speed by quantization

QuantizationFile sizeMemoryGenerationFirst tokenSource
Q4_K_M16.8 GBFits19 tok/s0.4 sDerived
Q8_028.6 GBFits11 tok/s0.4 sDerived
FP1653.8 GBFits5.9 tok/s0.4 sDerived

Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B on other hardware

Other models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

All models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · Qwen 3.6/3.8 27B 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.