Apple M5

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.

Aggregated from community-submitted runs, so the spread is wide by nature — it covers different models, resolutions, step counts and settings, not one controlled configuration. Read the middle 50% rather than the median alone. These figures are reproduced with attribution from llama.cpp-discussion-4167.

What AI models can a Apple M5 run?

1542 of 2118 indexed open-weight models fit a Apple M5 at 16,384 context with q8_0 KV cache, the largest being Qwen3.6-27B-Heretic2-Thinking at I1-IQ2_XXS. That covers text, vision-language, image, video and speech models.

How much usable memory does a Apple M5 actually have?

Its nameplate is 12 GB, but about 8.37 GiB is available to a model once driver and compositor overhead is accounted for, and only 9 GB of the pool can be allocated to the GPU at all.

Is a Apple M5 fast for local AI?

Its memory bandwidth is 154 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.