REDDIT · REDDIT// 34d agoBENCHMARK RESULT

MLX beats GGUF in Qwen benchmarks

A performance comparison of the Qwen 3.5 122B model on an M4 Max (128GB) shows that MLX outperforms GGUF by more than 2x in raw generation speed. The benchmark highlights significant efficiency gains for MLX in long-context scenarios, effectively halving time-to-first-token in 120k token tests.

// ANALYSIS

Native hardware optimization remains the definitive choice for high-parameter local AI inference on Apple Silicon.

–MLX achieved 34.7 t/s compared to GGUF's 15.8 t/s in 80k context tests, demonstrating the massive overhead of cross-platform abstractions.
–Prefill latency for 120k tokens was reduced by over 500 seconds on MLX, making long-context tasks significantly more viable.
–While GGUF provides superior ecosystem support and prompt caching, the raw throughput gap makes MLX the "no-brainer" for high-end Mac hardware.

// TAGS

qwen-3-5mlxllminferencebenchmarkopen-sourcegpu

DISCOVERED

34d ago

2026-03-08

PUBLISHED

37d ago

2026-03-06

RELEVANCE

9/ 10

AUTHOR

colwer