M1 Pro 16GB vs M4 16GB for local LLMs
1 report on the M1 Pro 16GB and 26 on the M4 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 1.7x higher on the M1 Pro 16GB (205 GB/s on the M1 Pro 16GB, 120 on the M4 16GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M1 Pro 16GB
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 205 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 5.2 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 1
M4 16GB
- Memory
- 16GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 120 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 4.3 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 26
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 Pro 16GB | M4 16GB |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | doesn't fit at these settings |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M1 Pro 16GB · M4 16GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M1 Pro 16GB · M4 16GB