llamaperf

Bonsai 2 27B

on M2 8GB · llama.cpp · 8,192 ctx

Tone: mixedApple hardware
Sep 19, 2026
Throughput
7.6 t/s gen · 42.0 tokens/s prompt processing (prefill)Prompt processing measures input prefill speed; it does not tell you the time to first token.
Quant
ternary (GGUF)
KV cache
q4_0
System RAM
8 GB

Use cases

codingvisionlong-context

Summary

User reports Bonsai 2 27B at 7.6 t/s generation and 42.0 t/s prompt processing on an 8GB M2 Mac mini, with all layers offloaded to the GPU and zero swap. Setup is PrismML's llama.cpp fork (prism-b10683-d8f26ee) with a ternary 5.95GB GGUF, flash attention on, -ub 256, q4_0 KV cache, -np 1, and iogpu.wired_limit_mb=6656. The default -ub 512 and f16 KV both fail to allocate; -ub 128 with f16 KV also runs at identical speed. Setting the wired limit to 7168 kernel-panicked the machine. In real use with llama-server at 8k context, a 1,896-token prompt took 47s to first token (pp ~40 t/s) and generated at 7.0 t/s; the same prompt via prefix cache took 0.8s. 16k context works but 32k OOMs, and PQ2_0 (7.21GB) does not fit. The user notes greedy decoding falls into repetition loops and recommends temp 1.0 / top-p 0.95 / top-k 20.