M4 Max (14-core CPU) · 48 GB
410 GB/s memory bandwidth · 38.4 GB usable for models · 9.6 GB left to macOS
The short answer
33 models run comfortably and 0 more will run tight at 8K context. The largest that fits is Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 at q4, generating around 45.8 tokens per second.
macOS9.6 GBweights26.3 GBKV cache1.1 GBheadroom11.1 GB
Every model on this Mac
| Model | Size | Best quant | Verdict | Speed est. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Qwen2.5 0.5B Instruct | 490M | bf16 | FITS · 37.3 GB FREE | 339 tok/s |
| BGE-M3 | 567M | bf16 | FITS · 37.3 GB FREE | 293 tok/s |
| Qwen3 0.6B | 600M | bf16 | FITS · 36.3 GB FREE | 277 tok/s |
| Parakeet TDT 0.6B v2 | 600M | bf16 | FITS · 37.2 GB FREE | 277 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 1B Instruct | 1.2B | bf16 | FITS · 35.7 GB FREE | 134 tok/s |
| Whisper Large v3 | 1.6B | bf16 | FITS · 35.3 GB FREE | 107 tok/s |
| Qwen3 1.7B | 1.7B | bf16 | FITS · 34.1 GB FREE | 97.7 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 3B Instruct | 3.2B | bf16 | FITS · 31.5 GB FREE | 51.7 tok/s |
| Qwen3 4B | 4B | q8 | FITS · 32.9 GB FREE | 78.1 tok/s |
| Qwen3 Embedding 4B | 4B | q8 | FITS · 32.9 GB FREE | 78.1 tok/s |
| Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3 | 7.3B | q8 | FITS · 29.6 GB FREE | 42.8 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 7B Instruct | 7.6B | bf16 | FITS · 22.7 GB FREE | 21.8 tok/s |
| InternVL3 8B | 8B | q8 | FITS · 29.9 GB FREE | 39.1 tok/s |
| Llama 3.1 8B Instruct | 8.0B | bf16 | FITS · 21.3 GB FREE | 20.7 tok/s |
| Qwen3 8B | 8.2B | q8 | FITS · 28.5 GB FREE | 38.1 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5-VL 7B Instruct | 8.3B | q8 | FITS · 29.1 GB FREE | 37.7 tok/s |
| Gemma 2 9B IT | 9.2B | q8 | FITS · 28.6 GB FREE | 33.8 tok/s |
| Llama 3.2 11B Vision Instruct | 10.7B | bf16 | FITS · 17.0 GB FREE | 15.5 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 14B Instruct | 14.7B | q8 | FITS · 21.2 GB FREE | 21.3 tok/s |
| Qwen3 14B | 14.8B | q8 | FITS · 21.3 GB FREE | 21.1 tok/s |
| GPT-OSS 20B | 21B | q8 | FITS · 15.7 GB FREE | 86.8 tok/s |
| Codestral 22B v0.1 | 22.2B | q8 | FITS · 12.9 GB FREE | 14.1 tok/s |
| Mistral Small 24B Instruct 2501 | 24B | q8 | FITS · 11.6 GB FREE | 13.0 tok/s |
| Gemma 3 27B IT | 27B | q8 | FITS · 9.7 GB FREE | 11.6 tok/s |
| Gemma 2 27B IT | 27.2B | q8 | FITS · 9.5 GB FREE | 11.5 tok/s |
| Qwen3 30B-A3B Instruct 2507 | 30.5B | q6 | FITS · 12.8 GB FREE | 124 tok/s |
| Qwen3 Coder 30B-A3B Instruct | 30.5B | q6 | FITS · 12.8 GB FREE | 124 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 32B Instruct | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 18.2 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5 Coder 32B Instruct | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 18.2 tok/s |
| DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32B | 32.5B | q4 | FITS · 18.0 GB FREE | 18.2 tok/s |
| Qwen3 32B | 32.8B | q6 | FITS · 9.6 GB FREE | 12.5 tok/s |
| Qwen2.5-VL 32B Instruct | 33B | q4 | FITS · 17.7 GB FREE | 17.9 tok/s |
| Mixtral 8x7B Instruct v0.1 | 46.7B | q4 | FITS · 11.1 GB FREE | 45.8 tok/s |
| Llama 3.3 70B Instruct | 70.6B | — | OVER | — |
| Qwen2.5 72B Instruct | 72.7B | — | OVER | — |
| Llama 3.2 90B Vision Instruct | 88B | — | OVER | — |
| GPT-OSS 120B | 116.8B | — | OVER | — |
| Qwen3 235B-A22B | 235B | — | OVER | — |
| DeepSeek V3 | 671B | — | OVER | — |