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M3 (16 GB) — benchmark record

M3 (16 GB) local LLM benchmarks on Apple Silicon Mac with 9 published rows across 9 models. Peak published speed is 95.0 tok/s on Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8B. Published runtimes include LM Studio, MLX, Ollama.

9Benchmark rows
9Models tested
95.0Fastest avg tok/s (Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8B)
0Lab benchmarks

Best published speed here is 95.0 tok/s on Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8B at Q4_K - Medium. This page is evidence, not the full buying answer.

Based on 9 external benchmarks; no lab runs yet.

Published runtimes: LM Studio, MLX, Ollama.

Published model coverage includes Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8B, Gemma 4 E2B, Gemma 4 E4B, Mistral 7B v0.3 plus 5 more published models. Published runtime coverage on this chip includes LM Studio, MLX, Ollama. Fastest published row is 95.0 tok/s on Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8B at Q4_K - Medium.

Raw benchmark rows for M3 (16 GB)

Rows sorted by avg tok/s descending. Click source badge to see original measurement page.

ModelQuantRAM req.ContextAvg tok/sPrompt tok/sRuntimeSource
Phi-4 Mini Instruct 3.8BQ4_K - Medium95.0 tok/sMLXref
Gemma 4 E2BQ4_K - Medium82.0 tok/sOllamaref
Gemma 4 E4BQ4_K - Medium62.0 tok/sOllamaref
Mistral 7B v0.3Q4_K - Medium62.0 tok/sOllamaref
Qwen3.5-9BQ4_K - Medium58.0 tok/sOllamaref
Ministral 3 8BQ4_K - Medium55.0 tok/sLM Studioref
Gemma 3 12BQ4_K - Medium38.0 tok/sOllamaref
Qwen 3 14BQ4_K - Medium30.0 tok/sOllamaref
Ministral 3 14BQ4_K - Medium30.0 tok/sLM Studioref

Use Rankings when you need the best overall answer for a Mac, and keep this page open when you need the evidence behind that recommendation.

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benchmarks.json — full dataset  ·  chips.json — chip summaries  ·  benchmarks.csv — CSV export

Data from in-house lab measurements plus community-published benchmarks. See all chip families →