M1 16GB vs M3 Pro 18GB for local LLMs
3 reports on the M1 16GB and 1 on the M3 Pro 18GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
Nobody has reported the same model at the same quant on both cards yet, so there's no measured head-to-head. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 2.2x higher on the M3 Pro 18GB (68 GB/s on the M1 16GB, 154 on the M3 Pro 18GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M1 16GB
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 68 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 2.6 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 3
M3 Pro 18GB
- Memory
- 18GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 7.4 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 1
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.
| Model | M1 16GB | M3 Pro 18GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 35.1 t/sQ2_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M1 16GB · M3 Pro 18GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M1 16GB · M3 Pro 18GB