Apple Silicon M-Series Max (64 GB Unified Memory) — Runnable LLMs, Max Context & tok/s Benchmarks

Physical Memory: 64 GB
Default / Tuned Usable: 48.0 / 56.3 GB
Memory Bandwidth: 546 GB/s
FP16 Compute: 32.8 TFLOPS
Typical Cloud $/hr / CapEx: $0.22/hr · $3,499
TDP / Native FP8: 95W · FP16/INT4

Load in VRAM Calculator → Generate vLLM / Ollama Config → Compare Self-Hosted GPU vs API →

Interactive Workload Simulator on Apple M-Max 64GB

Open-Weight Model Preset (or Custom)

Multi-Device Count (1× to 8× Apple M-Max 64GB)

Weight Quantization (bpw)

KV Cache Precision

Context Length (tokens) 32,768 tokens

Memory Breakdown & Bandwidth Ceiling

Fits Comfortably

Model Weights: 67% KV: 28.9% Overhead: 4.1%

Total Required Memory

27.66 GB

Per-Device Allocation: 27.66 / 64 GB

Model Weights

18.52 GB

KV: 8.00 GB

Est. Single-Stream Decode

11.3 tok/s

Est. Batched Throughput: 11.3 tok/s

Max Context Before OOM

150,303

tokens

3. Apple Silicon Unified Memory & Decode Bandwidth Upper Bound

macOS caps GPU wired memory around 48.0 GB (75%) by default; raising iogpu.wired_limit_mb unlocks up to 56.3 GB (88%).

sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=57672

On macOS Apple Silicon systems, default GPU wired allocation stops near 75% of physical unified RAM unless overridden with sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb (modeled up to an 88% safe ceiling that preserves OS stability). Autoregressive decode speed is bounded by effective external memory bandwidth divided by active parameter bytes plus active KV cache bytes read per step, verified every 12 hours by the VRAMLab automated architecture verification pipeline.

Open-Weight LLM Compatibility Matrix on 1× Apple M-Max 64GB (32K Context)

Fit status and estimated single-stream decode tok/s across FP16, Q8_0, and Q4_K_M on a single device
Model & Family	FP16	Q8_0	Q4_K_M	Best Comfortable Quant	Max Context (Q4_K_M)	Decode Speed (Q4_K_M)
DeepSeek-R1 (671B MoE) 671B · MLA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
DeepSeek-V3-0324 (671B MoE) 671B · MLA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B 70.6B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Q5_K_M	48,209 tokens	6.0 tok/s
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B 32.8B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	150,303 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen3-235B-A22B (MoE) 235B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
Qwen3-30B-A3B (MoE) 30.5B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	415,417 tokens	61.6 tok/s
Qwen3-32B 32.8B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	150,303 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen3-14B 14.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	309,087 tokens	22.4 tok/s
Qwen3-8B 8.2B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	371,379 tokens	32.8 tok/s
QwQ-32B (Reasoning) 32.8B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	150,303 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct 32.8B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	150,303 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct 72.7B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Q5_K_M	44,207 tokens	5.9 tok/s
Llama 4 Maverick (400B / 17B-128E MoE) 402B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
Llama 4 Scout (109B / 17B-16E MoE) 109B · HYBRID_SWA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct 70.6B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Q5_K_M	48,209 tokens	6.0 tok/s
Llama 3.1 405B Instruct 405B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct 8.03B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	418,612 tokens	35.1 tok/s
Gemma 3 27B IT (Multimodal) 27.4B · HYBRID_SWA	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	84,214 tokens	16.3 tok/s
Gemma 3 12B IT (Multimodal) 12.2B · HYBRID_SWA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	132,915 tokens	32.5 tok/s
Mistral Small 3.1 (24B) 24B · GQA	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	274,023 tokens	16.1 tok/s
Mistral Large 2411 (123B) 123B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—
Codestral 22B 22.2B · GQA	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	200,631 tokens	15.3 tok/s
Devstral Small (24B SWE Agent) 23.6B · GQA	Requires sysctl wired_limit	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	275,548 tokens	16.3 tok/s
GLM-4-32B-0414 32B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	638,777 tokens	15.0 tok/s
GLM-4-9B-0414 9.4B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	1,048,576 tokens	45.7 tok/s
Microsoft Phi-4 (14B) 14.7B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	247,574 tokens	20.6 tok/s
Microsoft Phi-4-mini-instruct (3.8B) 3.84B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	438,573 tokens	48.5 tok/s
Cohere Command A (111B) 111B · HYBRID_SWA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	—	—	—