llamaperf

Qwen3.8 27B

on M4 Max 36GB · Ollama · 128,000 ctx

Tone: mixedApple hardware
Oct 3, 2026
Throughput
48.0 t/s gen · 198.0 tokens/s prompt processing (prefill)Prompt processing measures input prefill speed; it does not tell you the time to first token.
Quant
NVFP4 (MLX)
KV cache
q8_0
System RAM
36 GB

Use cases

codingagenticlong-context

Summary

User reports Qwen3.8 27B at 48 tok/s decode and 198 tok/s prompt processing at 4K context on an M4 Max with 36GB unified memory. Setup is Ollama 0.34.4 with NVFP4/MLX weights, q8_0 KV cache, flash attention enabled, and a 128K configured context. The GGUF Q4_K_M version of the same model reached only about 10.7 tok/s decode. Decode falls to 44 tok/s at 8K, 25 tok/s at 16K and 32K, and 14 tok/s at 115K, where time to first token reaches 21 minutes. The user notes that maximum context is not the same as comfortable interactive context and that memory pressure and swap grew during the stress runs.