llamaperf

M5 Ultra 256GB vs NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell for local LLMs

30 reports on the M5 Ultra 256GB and 70 on the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell

Which is faster for local LLMs?

On Qwen3.8 27B at 4-bit, the M5 Ultra 256GB has 50.0 generation tokens/s (one run); prompt processing 1800.0 tokens/s (one run); the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell has 67.0 generation 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 bandwidth, which caps how fast a card can write, is 46% higher on the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell (1,229 GB/s on the M5 Ultra 256GB, 1,792 on the NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell).

M5 Ultra 256GB
Memory
256GB unified
Memory bandwidth
1,229 GB/s
FP16 compute
not on record
Reports
30
NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell
Memory
96GB
Memory bandwidth
1,792 GB/s
FP16 compute
503 TFLOPS
Reports
70

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

ModelM5 Ultra 256GBNVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell
Qwen3.8 27B4-bit50.0one runPP 1800.0 (one run)oMLX8K context67.0one runengine not statedcontext 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.

ModelM5 Ultra 256GBNVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell
Qwen3.8 27B14.9 t/sFP1618.3 t/sFP16
Qwen3.8 125B · 6B active50.8 t/sQ8_083.1 t/sQ5_K_S
Qwen3.6 35B · 3B active53.5 t/sFP1657.5 t/sFP16
DeepSeek V4 Flash 284B · 13B active66.9 t/sQ4_K_M130.8 t/sQ2_K
Qwen3.6 27B14.9 t/sFP1618.3 t/sFP16
Gemma 4 26B · 4B active40.1 t/sFP1649.3 t/sFP16
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 552B · 16B active89.4 t/sQ2_Kdoesn't fit at these settings

Change the context, RAM or model in the calculator: M5 Ultra 256GB · NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell

Every report on each card, with its source: M5 Ultra 256GB · NVIDIA RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell

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