Qwen3.6-35B-A3B crushes 27B UD on M5 Pro

This benchmark highlights the stark performance and quality differences between MoE and dense architectures on local Apple Silicon hardware.

• –The 35B A3B MLX 4bit model (MoE) achieved ~72 tokens/s, while the 27B UD MLX 6bit model (dense) crawled at ~9 tokens/s.
• –Despite having fewer active parameters per token, the 35B MoE scored 9.8/10 versus 8.75/10 for the dense model on four coding tasks.
• –The 27B dense model failed to show its expected reasoning depth advantage, making the 35B MoE the clear choice for local development on high-end Macs.