Qwen’s 30B models run great on my MBP (M4, 48GB) but the issue I have is cooling - the fan exhaust is straight onto the screen, which I can’t help thinking will eventually degrade it, given the thermal cycling it would go through. A Mac Studio makes far more sense for local inference just for this reason alone.
I have 24GB VRAM available and haven't yet found a decent model or combination.
Last one I tried is Qwen with continue, I guess I need to spend more time on this.
im currently running a custom Gemma4 26b MoE model on my 24gb m2... super fast and it beat deepseek, chatgpt, and gemini in 3 different puzzles/code challenges I tested it on. the issue now is the low context... I can only do 2048 tokens with my vram... the gap is slowly closing on the frontier models
It's a MoE model so I'd assume a cheaper MBP would simply result in some experts staying on CPU? And those would still have a sizeable fraction of the unified memory bandwidth available.
I haven’t tried this myself yet but you would still need enough non-vram ram available to the cpu to offload to cpu, right? This is a fully novice question, I have not ever tried it.
You're correct. If you don't have enough RAM for the model, it can still run but most of it will run on the CPU and be continuously reloaded from the SSD (through mmap).
A medium MoE like 35B can still achieve usable speeds in that setup, mind you, depending on what you're doing.