Live data from Hacker News

My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

lws.io

171–180 of 207 posts

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#171
post #6

yes, share performance, numbers if you can, also i wonder if you figured out a way to do a 2way audio with local models, or even explored that. I have a very similar setup but not too happy with the token speed, will try omlx though !!!

I haven't, but that's just because it really isn't my personal usage pattern.

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#172
post #106

Nice setup; but, for simple tasks or questions, AI is currently free? And it will probably stay free, as I don't see Google starting to charge for using AI on its search engine? So costs can't be a motivation for running small models locally? For more complex or important tasks, costs, autonomy and privacy matter, but then so does performance/quality. So I'm not completely convinced it's really worth it; but it's tem…

Getting undeserved safety filter refusals, watching LLM accidentally reading what you might not find comfortable showing, and hitting free tier/basic subscription quotas, are not fun. Going local removes somewhat irrational anxiety that come from those.

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#173
post #94

> Running a large model locally comes down to one thing: how much RAM it actually needs in memory. Not completely true. It's memory AND memory bandwidth. You can have 1tb of memory but if you have awful memory-bandwidth you'll also have slow tok/s. A3B helps with this, but so does MTP. From my experience, you'd be better off running the dense 27b-mlx with MTP than the 3.6 version with A3B. You say your model is ~20GB…

Running it depends on RAM, which is what I wrote, bandwidth is important for speed. I chose my words carefully, but you are absolutely right.

Coming back to this a few hours later, I've decided to add a section to explain this to the blog post. Thank you for flagging it.

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#175
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does make me wonder how the hosted stuff is so cheap. For pretty much everything else, hosted/rented is more expensive but offers better convenience and flexibility. But for AI, even if you consider the total lifetime cost and are utilizing it heavily. You never break even by buying.

There are economies of scale but there’s also a data center bubble (probably) so there might be some selling dollars for fifty cents going on.

Here's the thing that's a little different about data centers; we can tell from Anthropic and OpenAI that they're capacity constrained. Inference demand is there. I notice Cerebras doesn't offer much directly any more, all their capacity is getting completely sucked up by B2B sales. Grok did overbuild, but Anthropic was so desperate for more compute they ate their pride and leased the excess capacity.

That means all these data centers are being heavily utilized by actual end user inference demand. Well, some is research on new models, but a lot is actual end user demand. No one has given an explanation of why peoples usage would decline.

On top of that, margin on inference appears to be decent. It's model training that's a serious financial burden.

And maybe that's where there will be a slowdown, maybe the market doesn't justify spending as much on R&D as it does, but the end demand for inference is there.

Does that justify these stock prices? That's a different question. But the housing boom left behind endless rows of empty homes because demand disappeared. The 'dot com' boom left behind thousands of miles of dark fiber that'd been built out well ahead of demand for bandwidth. I can see the stock market having a giant sell off, but I don't see data centers sitting idle in that same fashion.

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#176
post #3
post #2

No mention of the performance of the models? I'm able to load a bunch of different models on my little mini-PC with 16GB RAM, but the performance is terrible. I always wonder what performance people are getting with local models that they find is acceptable?

I have an M4 pro (48 GB ram) and I run Gemma 4 26b a4b at 52 tok/s and Qwen 3.5b a3b at 72 tok/s. Both 4bit quantized. These are enough for my needs and the performance is more than good enough. I'm not running the MLX version of the Gemma model, if I did the inference speed would likely be a bit better. I wouldn't use them for coding features though.

I have a (now discontinued) 64gb mini pro and I’ve found the same qwen model to be almost unusable unless I kill Thinking on each turn.

What are you using them with/for?

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#177

I really like these show and tell style posts. I’m always curious how people have their setups and what tools they use. Also the blog has a nice theme and is easy to read. I wanna get a desktop Mac for local ai so that I don’t turn my laptop into a delta 15k rpm fan when I run things. I guess I’ll get in line for one hah.

if you like this style and want more r/LocalLLaMA and r/homelabs have a bunch

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#179
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an M4 pro (48 GB ram) and I run Gemma 4 26b a4b at 52 tok/s and Qwen 3.5b a3b at 72 tok/s. Both 4bit quantized. These are enough for my needs and the performance is more than good enough. I'm not running the MLX version of the Gemma model, if I did the inference speed would likely be a bit better. I wouldn't use them for coding features though.

My perf sucks compared to yours. Added it to the post - same model averages 325 tok/s in processing prompts, and 34 tok/s in token generation. What am I doing wrong..?

Wow, that's just about half the perf. I'm not sure what you're doing differently, though our hardware is a bit different: I am on a Macbook Pro M4 Pro, while you're on a Mac Mini.

I would try a different version of the model from HuggingFace while ensuring it's MLX. I'm also using LM Studio, not oMLX, and I've seen some threads like these:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1spuwir/omlx_10...

Re: My local model setup on an M4 Pro Mac Mini

#180

I like the in-depth description. Everything from the naming convention of the models (and how much RAM they require) as well as all the components needed underscores just how complicated this all still is. I suppose I am waiting for AI-in-a-Box to come along so I can (painlessly) join in. (I'm sure wrangling with all these esoteric aspects of LLMs though is fun for some people.)

I've seen https://www.lucebox.com/ as an interesting option
Post reply on HN