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by aegis_camera 75 days ago
We implemented two techniques to run massive 100B+ parameter MoE models natively on the M5 Pro 64GB MacBook Pro:

TurboQuant KV compression: We ported the V3 Lloyd-Max codebooks from the TurboQuant paper (Zandieh et al., ICLR 2026) into native C++ and fused dequantization into Metal shaders. This achieves a measured 4.3× KV cache compression at runtime, completely eliminating Python overhead.

SSD Expert Streaming: To fit a 122B parameter model (e.g., Qwen3.5-122B MoE) without triggering macOS VM swapping or Watchdog kernel kills, the full ~60 GB weight file remains on NVMe. Only the top-k active expert pages are streamed to the GPU per forward pass at ~9 GB/s. As a result, inference runs with only 2,694 MB of active GPU VRAM on the M5 Pro 64GB, while the OS page cache automatically handles hot-expert reuse.

By combining these two approaches, we can comfortably run massive models in memory-constrained environments on Apple Silicon.

Also tested QWEN 4B on IPHONE 13 Pro.

Code and implementation details: https://github.com/SharpAI/SwiftLM

2 comments

what tokens/s are you getting with a 122B MoE model in this setup? I didn't see any benchmarks in the benchmarks section on the readme.md
https://www.sharpai.org/benchmark/ The MLX part is what we've done with SwiftLM, the local result is still being verified more details are on-going.
I'll add more details. We just wired up the pipeline on both MAC and IOS.
yeah this I'd like to see added to teh readme.
Thanks, pure Swift was the design idea and since I found nothing could be used for my project https://www.sharpai.org then I created Swift version. Python is too heavy to be delivered with application, user mentioned they want to use MLX, that's why I've been working on it for 1-2 weeks for bug fixing and testing , then suddenly TurboQuant proposed, I had a quick integration. My 64GB M5 Pro is already good for my local security task, now it's able to use M1/M2 Mini w/ 8GB memory.