Qwen3.8 27B
on M5 Max · kapitsa
Summary
User compares their own engine, kapitsa, against Ollama 0.40 running Qwen3.8-27B at 4-bit on four Apple Silicon Macs, reporting 140 vs 68 t/s decode on an M5 Max.
Kapitsa uses kflash speculative decoding, where a drafter guesses 7 tokens ahead and the 27B verifies a tree of guesses in one pass; Ollama runs the model with MTP or without speculation.
Other decode results: M5 Pro 81 vs 40, M4 Pro 63 vs 32, M3 Pro 40 vs 23. The user notes Ollama reads prompts faster on the M5 Max, so kapitsa's advantage is in decode. The 27B needs 32GB of memory; a 9B model is offered for 16GB machines.