Can Apple M3 Ultra run Qwen3.8 27B?
Yes. Measured 12.46 tok/s generation (MLX (mlx_lm.benchmark), BF16, 8,192-token context; source).
Every measured result for Qwen3.8 27B on Apple M3 Ultra
| Build | Quant / setup | Engine | tok/s | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB: Qwen3.8 27B and Mistral Medium 3.5 (Apple MLX benchmark) | BF16, 8,192-token context | MLX (mlx_lm.benchmark) | 12.46 | source |
Memory: Apple M3 Ultra has 512 GB. Qwen3.8 27B weights are about 16.5 GB at Q4_K_M (27B params × 4.89 bits ÷ 8, before context/KV cache). Arithmetic, not a measurement; long contexts need more. Check other quants in the VRAM calculator.
Speeds are decode (generation) tokens/sec as reported by each source; quant, engine and context differ, so small gaps are noise.
All measured speeds for Qwen3.8 27B: best home rig for Qwen3.8 27B.
Qwen3.8 27B on other hardware: 2x Apple M5 Ultra · 4x Apple M5 Ultra · Apple M5 Ultra · RTX 3060 12GB · RTX 3090 · RTX 4060 Ti 16GB · RTX Spark N1X
Other models measured on Apple M3 Ultra: DeepSeek R1 671B · Mistral Medium 3.5 128B · Muse Spark Open 816B-A42B · gpt-oss 20B
Not enough VRAM? Rent before you buy. Run Qwen3.8 27B on a bigger GPU on a rented 24–96 GB cloud GPU by the hour and see the real speed before spending €1,000+. Try it on RunPod
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