M3 Pro 36GB vs M4 Pro 48GB for local LLMs
1 report on the M3 Pro 36GB and 17 on the M4 Pro 48GB
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 1.8x higher on the M4 Pro 48GB (154 GB/s on the M3 Pro 36GB, 273 on the M4 Pro 48GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M3 Pro 36GB
- Memory
- 36GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 7.4 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 1
M4 Pro 48GB
- Memory
- 48GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 273 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 9.2 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 17
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 | M3 Pro 36GB | M4 Pro 48GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 6.4 t/sQ5_K_M | 9.4 t/sQ6_K |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 24.5 t/sQ4_K_M | 37.5 t/sQ5_K_M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 6.4 t/sQ5_K_M | 9.4 t/sQ6_K |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 16.2 t/sQ5_K_M | 18.3 t/sQ8_0 |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M3 Pro 36GB · M4 Pro 48GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M3 Pro 36GB · M4 Pro 48GB