M4 Pro 48GB vs M5 32GB for local LLMs
17 reports on the M4 Pro 48GB and 4 on the M5 32GB
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 (273 GB/s on the M4 Pro 48GB, 154 on the M5 32GB). The estimates below compare them on the models people run most.
M4 Pro 48GB
- Memory
- 48GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 273 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- 9.2 TFLOPS
- Reports
- 17
M5 32GB
- Memory
- 32GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 154 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 4
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 | M4 Pro 48GB | M5 32GB |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.8 27B | 9.4 t/sQ6_K | 9.2 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 37.5 t/sQ5_K_M | 33.5 t/sQ3_K_M |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | doesn't fit at these settings |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 9.4 t/sQ6_K | 9.2 t/sQ4_K_S |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 18.3 t/sQ8_0 | 20.3 t/sQ4_K_M |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M4 Pro 48GB · M5 32GB
Every report on each card, with its source: M4 Pro 48GB · M5 32GB