M5 Max 48GB vs AMD Radeon 890M for local LLMs
67 reports on the M5 Max 48GB and 2 on the AMD Radeon 890M
Which is faster for local LLMs?
On Qwen3.5 35B · 3B active at 4-bit, the M5 Max 48GB has 111.2 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 3378.3 tokens/s (one run); the AMD Radeon 890M has 14.9 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 212.1 tokens/s (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
- 48GB unified
- Memory bandwidth
- 614 GB/s
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 67
- Memory
- shared memory unified
- Memory bandwidth
- not on record
- FP16 compute
- not on record
- Reports
- 2
Measured on both
Generation and prompt processing speeds 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 bit class. Each side shows the engines and reported context behind its median. Context can mean a configured window or prompt depth, so these are community comparisons with differing settings. How to read these
| Model | M5 Max 48GB | AMD Radeon 890M |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.5 35B · 3B active4-bit | 111.2one runPP 3378.3 (one run)llama.cppcontext not stated | 14.9one runPP 212.1 (one run)llama.cppcontext not stated |
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 | M5 Max 48GB | AMD Radeon 890M |
|---|---|---|
| Qwen3.5 35B · 3B active | 88.4 t/sQ5_K_M | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.8 27B | 22.3 t/sQ6_K | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active | doesn't fit at these settings | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active | 88.4 t/sQ5_K_M | not in the calculator yet |
| DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active | doesn't fit at these settings | not in the calculator yet |
| Qwen3.6 27B | 22.3 t/sQ6_K | not in the calculator yet |
| Gemma 4 26B · 4B active | 43.2 t/sQ8_0 | not in the calculator yet |
Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Max 48GB · AMD Radeon 890M
Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Max 48GB · AMD Radeon 890M