llamaperf

M1 16GB vs M6 16GB for local LLMs

2 reports on the M1 16GB and 0 on the M6 16GB

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 M6 16GB (68 GB/s on the M1 16GB, 154 on the M6 16GB). 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
2
M6 16GB
Memory
16GB unified
Memory bandwidth
154 GB/s
FP16 compute
not on record
Reports
0

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.

ModelM1 16GBM6 16GB
Qwen3.8 27Bdoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Qwen3.6 27Bdoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings
Gemma 4 26B · 4B activedoesn't fit at these settingsdoesn't fit at these settings

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M1 16GB · M6 16GB

Every report on each card, with its source: M1 16GB · M6 16GB

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