How fast will Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B feel on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB?

Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B is a 35.95B-parameter mixture-of-experts model (3B active per token). At Q4_K_M it needs about 22.9 GB of memory. The MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB has 96 GB usable, so it fits entirely in memory. Expect about 95 tokens/sec (84–105), with the first token after 0.3 s for a short prompt. This estimate is based on community benchmarks of this exact setup.

Speed by quantization

QuantizationFile sizeMemoryGenerationFirst tokenSource
Q4_K_M22.1 GBFits95 tok/s0.3 sMeasured
Q8_036.9 GBFits89 tok/s0.3 sMeasured
FP1669.4 GBFits55 tok/s0.3 sDerived

Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B A3B on other hardware

Other models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB

All models on the MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · Qwen 3.5/3.6 35B 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.