What can the Apple M3 Max (40-core GPU, 64GB) run?

64 GB unified memory (~48.0 GB usable for models) · 400 GB/s memory bandwidth

Measured: 66.31 tok/s on Llama 2 7B Q4_0 (llama.cpp tg128). Source: llama.cpp Apple Silicon benchmarks (Llama 2 7B Q4_0, tg128)

ModelVerdictBest quant that fitsEst. tok/s (Q4)
Llama 3.1 8B InstructYesF16~52.3
Llama 3.3 70B InstructBarelyQ4_K_M~5.9
Llama 3.2 3B InstructYesF16~131
Llama 4 Scout (17B active, 16 experts)No——
Qwen3 8BYesF16~51.0
Qwen3 14BYesF16~28.2
Qwen3 32BYes, usableQ8_0~12.7
Qwen3 30B-A3B (MoE)YesQ8_0~62.2
Qwen3 235B-A22B (MoE)No——
Qwen2.5 Coder 32B InstructYes, usableQ8_0~12.7
Gemma 3 4BYesF16~97.2
Gemma 3 12BYesF16~34.3
Gemma 3 27BYes, usableQ8_0~15.3
Mistral Small 3.1 24BYes, usableQ8_0~17.4
Mistral Nemo 12BYesF16~34.3
Phi-4 14BYesF16~28.4
DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 32BYes, usableQ8_0~12.7
DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 70BBarelyQ4_K_M~5.9
gpt-oss-20b (MoE)YesMXFP4 (native)~61.0
gpt-oss-120b (MoE)No——
DeepSeek V3 / R1 671B (MoE)No——

Estimated tok/s = calibrated bandwidth ÷ active weight size. Real results vary with runtime, context and drivers.

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