Gemma 4 31B Apple Silicon benchmark and best Macs

Runtime support mentioned

Official specs

• Architecture: Dense.
• Total parameters: 30.7B.
• Context: 256K tokens.
• Sliding window: 1024 tokens.
• Modalities: Text, Image.

Official takeaways

• Reasoning: All models in the family are designed as highly capable reasoners, with configurable thinking modes.
• Extended Multimodalities: Processes Text, Image with variable aspect ratio and resolution support (all models), Video, and Audio (featured natively on the E2B and E4B models).
• Diverse & Efficient Architectures: Offers Dense and Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variants of different sizes for scalable deployment.
• Increased Context Window: The small models feature a 128K context window, while the medium models support 256K.

What practitioners keep saying

• The oMLX context table reports gemma-4-31b-it 8bit on an M5 Max 40-core 128GB Mac at 1024 tokens context with 607.7 tok/s prompt processing, 15.2 tok/s generation, and peak memory at 31.8GB.
• The oMLX context table reports gemma-4-31b-it 8bit on an M5 Max 40-core 128GB Mac at 4096 tokens context with 628.6 tok/s prompt processing, 11.9 tok/s generation, 6.516s TTFT, and peak memory at 34.5GB.
• The page also includes separate batching results, so multi-request aggregate throughput should be modeled outside single-stream generation claims.

Apple Silicon field sources

• oMLX community benchmarks

  2026-05-05 · M5 Max 40-core GPU, 128GB unified memory · oMLX

  A same-day oMLX row shows the 8-bit Gemma 4 31B conversion running on an M5 Max 128GB setup, adding high-memory Max-tier context for dense Gemma while preserving the first-party reproduction gate.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-05-01 · MacBook Pro M5 Max 64GB · atomic.chat

  A high-engagement practitioner comparison reports Gemma 4 31B producing the preferred one-shot game implementation on an M5 Max 64GB MacBook Pro even though Qwen3.6-27B reported higher decode speed.

• oMLX community benchmarks

  2026-04-23 · MacBook Pro M4 Max 36GB · oMLX

  Gemma 4 31B now has a concrete oMLX 4-bit M4 Max 36GB profile, but the dense 31B decode rate makes it a more conditional recommendation than the smaller-active-parameter frontier options.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-04-19 · M5 Max laptop, 128GB unified memory

  A Gemma 4 31B operator says an M5 Max 128GB laptop can run the 4-bit dense model for one or two local agents, but concurrency pressure quickly pushes the workload toward dedicated GPU infrastructure.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-04-14 · MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · cupel

  An M5 Max 128GB operator reports preferring the Gemma 4 31B 4-bit path over 8-bit in a subjective cupel comparison, but the source itself and comments make the result unsuitable as benchmark truth.

1 more Apple Silicon field source tracked in the research queue.

Runtime mentions in the field

Hardware mentioned in reports

What would improve confidence

• Reproduce Field Performance Signal
• Upgrade To First Party Measurement