M1 16GB vs NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB for local LLMs
2 reports on the M1 16GB and 46 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Gemma 4 8B at 4-bit, the M1 16GB runs at 8.2 tokens per second (one run) and the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB at 45.0 (one run). Those are community reports whose engines and settings differ, so the gap is a rough sign, not a controlled measure of the two cards. Memory bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 5.3x higher on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB (68 GB/s on the M1 16GB, 360 on the NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB).
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 68 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 2.6 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 2
- Memory
- 12GB
- Memory bandwidth
- 360 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 51 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 46
Measured on both
Median tokens per second 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 quant level. Engines and context lengths can still differ between the runs. How to read these
| Model | M1 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 8B4-bit | 8.2one run | 45.0one run |
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.
| Model | M1 16GB | NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB |
|---|---|---|
| Gemma 4 8B | 9.7 t/sQ5_K_M | 30.5 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B 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 35B · 3B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 13.1 t/sQ6_K, experts in RAM |
| Qwen3.6 27B | doesn't fit at these settings | 1.5 t/sQ8_0, layers on CPU |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | doesn't fit at these settings | 58.8 t/sQ2_K |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M1 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M1 16GB · NVIDIA RTX 3060 12GB