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Qwen3.8-27B on M1 Max 32GB: MLX 15.8 tok/s vs llama.cpp 9.7 tok/s - but llama.cpp prefill is faster

This story is from 2026-09-07. It is preserved in the archive; the latest stories are on the live feed.

I’ve been setting up an M1 Max Mac Studio (24-core GPU, 32GB unified memory) as a local LLM server and wanted to compare MLX vs llama.cpp on Qwen3.8-27B. I tried to keep the model footprint and benchmark workload reasonably close. MLX mlx-community/Qwen3.8-27B-4bit ~16.1GB 512 prompt tokens / 700 g…

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  1. 2026-09-07 18:34 · r/LocalLLM
    Qwen3.8-27B on M1 Max 32GB: MLX 15.8 tok/s vs llama.cpp 9.7 tok/s - but llama.cpp prefill is faster

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