Apple M3

Speed is modeled, not measured: decode is memory-bandwidth bound, so tokens per second is bytes read per token against achievable bandwidth. Mixture-of-experts models carry a wider band because only the routed experts are read each step, and few have been measured publicly.

What AI models can a Apple M3 run?

1048 of 2118 indexed open-weight models fit a Apple M3 at 65,536 context with q4_0 KV cache, the largest being gemma-3-12b-it-vl-Gemini-3-Pro-Preview-Heretic-Uncensored-Thinking at I1-Q2_K_S. That covers text, vision-language, image, video and speech models.

How much usable memory does a Apple M3 actually have?

Its nameplate is 8 GB, but about 5.58 GiB is available to a model once driver and compositor overhead is accounted for, and only 6 GB of the pool can be allocated to the GPU at all.

Is a Apple M3 fast for local AI?

Its memory bandwidth is 102 GB/s, and that figure — not teraflops — is what governs token generation speed. Capacity decides what you can run; bandwidth decides how fast it runs.