smartypantsnet/mac-benchmarks

Smarty Pants Mac Benchmarks

Speed and quality for open models on real Apple Silicon Macs, made with our open model factory. Each section is one model on one Mac. The bold row is the base version; the rows marked ↳ are versions we built or tested to make it faster, smaller or smarter, measured the same way on the same Mac.

A version counts as better only if it is faster or smaller and its answers stay as good, or if its answers get better at the same speed. Everything else is listed anyway, so you can see what did not work.

Summary

Model	Mac	Base speed	Best version	Its speed	Its quality
Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty)	Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)	99.7 tok/s, quality 86.5%	base is still best
Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty), GSM8K math	Apple M5 Pro, 64 GB (Mac mini)	99.7 tok/s, quality 89.0%	base is still best
Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty), draft-ahead decoding	Apple M5 Pro, 64 GB (Mac mini)	95.9 tok/s, quality 89.0%	base is still best
Qwen 3.8 27B	Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)	35.7 tok/s, quality 90.9%	base is still best
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	Apple M3 Max, 36 GB (MacBook Pro)	61.4 tok/s, quality –	base is still best
Qwen3.5-0.8B	Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)	120.0 tok/s, quality 7%	Qwen3.5-0.8B + MIT CSAIL's p50c weight edit (reproduced)	120.0 tok/s	33%

Quality means something different per test, so compare it only within one section.

Results

Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty) on Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)

Measured 2026-10-22.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality (top-1 match vs 8-bit)	Perplexity	Checks	Verdict
Standard 4-bit (what we serve)	99.7		4.13 GB	86.5%	14.60	10/10	base
↳ MXFP4 (4-bit float)	about 104	+4%	–	–	about 15.2	–	no gain: 4% faster but 4% worse quality
↳ 4-bit, finer groups (g32)	about 91	-9%	–	–	14.54	–	slower: slightly better quality, 9% slower
↳ Mixed 3/6-bit	13-20% faster		9-13% less	–	+31-36%	–	worse: too lossy
↳ 3-bit	13-20% faster		9-13% less	–	+31-36%	9/10	worse: too lossy, 1 wrong answer
↳ Standard 4-bit + 8-bit attention memory	same		–	–	–	–	no gain: no difference on short chats
↳ 8-bit copy (quality yardstick, not served)	57.0	-43%	–	100.0%	–	–	reference: more bits, slower

How it was measured: Speed: output tokens per second on a short chat (median of 3 after a warm-up). Memory: peak during a 4,096-token prompt. Quality: how often the version picks the same next word as a near-lossless 8-bit copy (top-1 match), plus 10 short questions with one right answer.

Takeaway: the standard 4-bit build is still the best tradeoff. Speed tracks how many bits each weight uses, and below 4 bits quality drops sharply. Next to try: DWQ 3-bit.

Entered from the factory report as posted on the day; the full result files are on the Mac mini. Rows marked 'about' will be exact after the next run.

Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty), GSM8K math on Apple M5 Pro, 64 GB (Mac mini)

Measured 2026-11-05.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality (GSM8K, 500 problems right)	Paired vs base	Verdict
Standard 4-bit (what we serve)	99.7		4.13 GB	89.0%		base
↳ DWQ 3-bit (tuned to copy the full model)	120.1	+20%	3.62 GB	83.6%	+14 / -41 (p < 0.001)	worse: faster and smaller, but 2.5 to 8.3 points fewer right
↳ DWQ 4-bit (tuned to copy the full model)	100.4	+1%	4.13 GB	88.4%	+20 / -23 (p = 0.76)	no gain: same speed, no real difference in right answers

How it was measured: 500 GSM8K grade-school math problems (openai/gsm8k test, seed 0), the same for every version, served the way Smarty Pants serves Smarty: thinking off, greedy, up to 1,024 tokens. DWQ builds: mlx-lm DWQ, 1,024 samples, group size 64. A version is better only with more right answers at McNemar p < 0.05; faster counts only if the 95% interval of the accuracy change stays above -2 points. Script: scripts/model-factory/benchcheck.py.

Takeaway: neither DWQ build beats the one we serve. 3-bit DWQ is about 20% faster and 13% smaller but gets about 5 points fewer right; 4-bit DWQ is no different. The served build stays. We keep negative results on the page.

Qwen3.5-4B (Smarty), draft-ahead decoding on Apple M5 Pro, 64 GB (Mac mini)

Measured 2026-11-05.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality (GSM8K, 500 problems right)	Paired vs base	Verdict
Standard 4-bit (what we serve)	95.9		2.90 GB	89.0%		base
↳ Standard 4-bit + guess 4 words ahead	105.2	+10%	3.43 GB	88.8%	+4 / -5 (p = 1.0)	no gain: 10% faster, same right answers, but 18% more memory
↳ Standard 4-bit + guess 2 words ahead	93.2	-3%	3.43 GB	88.2%	+4 / -8 (p = 0.39)	slower: 3% slower and 18% more memory

How it was measured: draft-ahead (speculative) decoding: a small guesser model, mlx-community/Qwen3.5-0.8B-MLX-4bit, proposes 2 or 4 words and Smarty checks them in one pass. Same 500 GSM8K problems and served settings as above (thinking off, greedy, up to 1,024 tokens); the standard build was timed again in the same sitting. Guesses accepted: 85% (2 at a time), 76% (4 at a time).

Takeaway: no win yet. Guessing 4 ahead is 10% faster with the same right answers, but it needs 18% more memory, and our rule allows at most 5% more. Guessing 2 ahead is slower.

Qwen 3.8 27B on Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)

Measured 2026-11-02.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality (top-1 match vs 8-bit)	Perplexity	Checks	Verdict
Standard 4-bit (mlx-community)	35.7		18.26 GB	90.9%	7.95	10/10	base
↳ Mixed 3/6-bit	slower		–	–	–	–	worse: slower and lower quality
↳ Standard 4-bit + 8-bit attention memory	same		–	–	–	–	no gain: no difference on short chats
↳ 8-bit copy (quality yardstick, not served)	–		–	100.0%	7.67	–	reference: quality yardstick

How it was measured: Speed: output tokens per second on a short chat (median of 3 after a warm-up). Memory: peak during a 4,096-token prompt. Quality: how often the version picks the same next word as a near-lossless 8-bit copy (top-1 match), plus 10 short questions with one right answer. mlx 0.32.4.

Takeaway: the standard 4-bit build runs well on a 32 GB+ Mac; neither tested change helped.

Entered from the factory report as posted on the day; the full result files are on the Mac mini. Rows marked 'about' will be exact after the next run.

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on Apple M3 Max, 36 GB (MacBook Pro)

Measured 2026-09-08.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality	Perplexity	Checks	Verdict
Standard 4-bit (mlx-community)	61.4		21.52 GB	–	–	–	base

How it was measured: speed only: one request at a time, 500 to 4,096-token prompts, 128 tokens out, mlx-vlm 0.7.0. With 8 requests at once the Mac produced 193 tok/s in total. No quality test yet.

Qwen3.5-0.8B on Apple M5 Pro (Mac mini)

Measured 2026-11-04.

Version	Speed (tok/s)	vs base	Peak memory	Quality (MATH-500, 30 problems)	Finished	Verdict
Qwen3.5-0.8B, original	120.0		2.22 GB	7%	7%	base
↳ Qwen3.5-0.8B + MIT CSAIL's p50c weight edit (reproduced)	120.0	same	2.19 GB	33%	60%	better: finished 60% of answers (was 7%), ended in a loop 3% (was 87%)

How it was measured: 30 MATH-500 math problems (seeded random pick), thinking on, up to 32,768 tokens, MIT's sampling settings, 1 answer per problem, graded with math-verify 0.9.0 by MIT's rule. Runs on MLX in bfloat16 rather than vLLM, so single answers are not comparable one to one with MIT's.

Takeaway: the edit changes 0.016% of the weights. On our Mac it cut loops from 87% to 3% and raised correct answers from 7% to 33%, with no change in speed or memory. Problem by problem, the edited model got 8 right that the original missed and lost none (sign test p ≈ 0.008). MIT reports 7.9% to 48.1% on all 500 problems with 4 answers each.

Credit: this is a reproduction of MIT CSAIL's published edit (Takehi, Teoh, Zhang and Khattab, weight-space programming, edit and evaluation code from RikiyaT/lm_understand-logs). Smarty Pants did not make this edit; we rebuilt it bit for bit, hash-checked it and measured it on a Mac.

Use these models without a Mac

Smarty Pants serves models from Macs like these at https://smartypants.network/v1 (OpenAI-compatible). Smarty (smartypants/smarty) is the Qwen3.5-4B standard 4-bit above; see https://smartypants.network for which models are open and their prices.

Data

results.json holds every number on this page, one entry per section, rebuilt by scripts/model-factory/benchmarks.py after each factory run. No prompts, answers or machine identifiers are included.