Apple Mac Studio M4 Max (128 GB Unified Memory) — Runnable LLMs, Max Context & tok/s Benchmarks

Physical Memory: 128 GB
Default / Tuned Usable: 96.0 / 112.6 GB
Memory Bandwidth: 546 GB/s
FP16 Compute: 36.4 TFLOPS
Typical Cloud $/hr / CapEx: $0.32/hr · $4,499
TDP / Native FP8: 120W · FP16/INT4

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

Interactive Workload Simulator on Mac Studio 128GB

Open-Weight Model Preset (or Custom)

Multi-Device Count (1× to 8× Mac Studio 128GB)

Weight Quantization (bpw)

KV Cache Precision

Context Length (tokens) 32,768 tokens

Memory Breakdown & Bandwidth Ceiling

Fits Comfortably

Model Weights: 77.4% KV: 19.4% Overhead: 3.2%

Total Required Memory

51.51 GB

Per-Device Allocation: 51.51 / 128 GB

Model Weights

39.86 GB

KV: 10.00 GB

Est. Single-Stream Decode

6.0 tok/s

Est. Batched Throughput: 6.0 tok/s

Max Context Before OOM

232,758

tokens

3. Apple Silicon Unified Memory & Decode Bandwidth Upper Bound

macOS caps GPU wired memory around 96.0 GB (75%) by default; raising iogpu.wired_limit_mb unlocks up to 112.6 GB (88%).

sudo sysctl iogpu.wired_limit_mb=115343

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× Mac Studio 128GB (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)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	232,758 tokens	6.0 tok/s
DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B 32.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	380,989 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	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	1,030,582 tokens	61.6 tok/s
Qwen3-32B 32.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	380,989 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen3-14B 14.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	678,186 tokens	22.4 tok/s
Qwen3-8B 8.2B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	781,489 tokens	32.8 tok/s
QwQ-32B (Reasoning) 32.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	380,989 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct 32.8B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	380,989 tokens	11.3 tok/s
Qwen2.5-72B-Instruct 72.7B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	228,757 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)	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	265,971 tokens	24.3 tok/s
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct 70.6B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Q8_0	232,758 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	879,985 tokens	35.1 tok/s
Gemma 3 27B IT (Multimodal) 27.4B · HYBRID_SWA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	203,278 tokens	16.3 tok/s
Gemma 3 12B IT (Multimodal) 12.2B · HYBRID_SWA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	286,706 tokens	32.5 tok/s
Mistral Small 3.1 (24B) 24B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	643,122 tokens	16.1 tok/s
Mistral Large 2411 (123B) 123B · GQA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Q6_K	120,821 tokens	3.7 tok/s
Codestral 22B 22.2B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	464,273 tokens	15.3 tok/s
Devstral Small (24B SWE Agent) 23.6B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	644,647 tokens	16.3 tok/s
GLM-4-32B-0414 32B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	1,048,576 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	542,853 tokens	20.6 tok/s
Microsoft Phi-4-mini-instruct (3.8B) 3.84B · GQA	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	Fits Comfortably	FP16 / BF16	899,947 tokens	48.5 tok/s
Cohere Command A (111B) 111B · HYBRID_SWA	Out of Memory (OOM)	Out of Memory (OOM)	Fits Comfortably	Q5_K_M	194,714 tokens	4.6 tok/s