llamaperf

NVIDIA DGX Spark vs M4 24GB for local LLMs

87 reports on the NVIDIA DGX Spark and 8 on the M4 24GB

Which is faster for local LLMs?

On Qwen3.8 27B at 4-bit, the NVIDIA DGX Spark has generation speed not reported; prompt processing 899.9 tokens/s (one run); the M4 24GB has 6.5 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 60.8 tokens/s (one run). Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 2.3x higher on the NVIDIA DGX Spark (273 GB/s on the NVIDIA DGX Spark, 120 on the M4 24GB).

NVIDIA DGX Spark
Memory
128GB unified
Memory bandwidth
273 GB/s
FP16 compute
125 TFLOPS
Reports
87
M4 24GB
Memory
24GB unified
Memory bandwidth
120 GB/s
FP16 compute
4.3 TFLOPS
Reports
8

Measured on both

Generation and prompt processing speeds from plain runs (one device, one request, no speculative decoding, the whole model in the device's memory) of the same model size at the same bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these

ModelNVIDIA DGX SparkM4 24GB
Qwen3.8 27B4-bit-0 runsPP 899.9 (one run)llama.cpp16K context6.5one runPP 60.8 (one run)llama.cppcontext not stated

Estimated by the calculator

The quant the calculator recommends for each card and its estimated speed at a 32,768-token context with 32 GB of system RAM, from memory bandwidth and the model's shape. Where a model was also measured above, the measurement wins.

ModelNVIDIA DGX SparkM4 24GB
Qwen3.8 27B4.0 t/sFP1610.8 t/sQ2_K
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active14.4 t/sQ6_Kdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active14.5 t/sFP1635.8 t/sQ2_K
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active38.3 t/sQ2_Kdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 27B4.0 t/sFP1610.8 t/sQ2_K
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active10.8 t/sFP1624.1 t/sQ3_K_S
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: NVIDIA DGX Spark · M4 24GB

Every report on each card, with its source: NVIDIA DGX Spark · M4 24GB

More comparisons