GLM-5 Apple Silicon benchmark and best Macs

Runtime support mentioned

Official specs

• Total parameters: 744B.
• Active parameters: 40B.
• Attention: DeepSeek Sparse Attention.

Official takeaways

• Humanity’s Last Exam (HLE) & other reasoning tasks: We evaluate with a maximum generation length of 131,072 tokens (temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, max_new_tokens=131072).
• BrowserComp: Without context management, we retain details from the most recent 5 turns. With context management, we use the same discard-all strategy as DeepSeek-v3.2 and Kimi K2.5.
• Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Terminus 2): We evaluate with the Terminus framework using timeout=2h, temperature=0.7, top_p=1.0, max_new_tokens=8192, with a 128K context window. Resource limits are capped at 16 CPUs and 32 GB RAM.
• Terminal-Bench 2.0 (Claude Code): We evaluate in Claude Code 2.1.14 (think mode, default effort) with temperature=1.0, top_p=0.95, max_new_tokens=65536.

What practitioners keep saying

• Use the official launch post to ground GLM-5 currentness and local-serving planning.
• Do not treat the launch post as Apple Silicon performance evidence without hardware, runtime build, quantization, context, and measured throughput.
• The oMLX single-request table reports GLM-5-4bit on an M3 Ultra 512GB Mac at pp1024/tg128 with 187.0 tok/s prompt processing, 16.7 tok/s generation, 5.477s TTFT, 13.156s end-to-end time, and peak memory at 391.82GB.

Apple Silicon field sources

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-02-24 · Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · oMLX

  An accessible M3 Ultra 512GB oMLX report shows GLM-5 running on Apple Silicon with slow single-request latency but materially better throughput under continuous batching and persistent KV cache.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-02-16 · M3 Ultra

  A LocalLLaMA operator reports Unsloth GLM-5 low-bit quants running on M3 Ultra, including Q2 around 20 tok/s, while the source leaves key setup details unspecified.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB

  GLM-5 is no longer theoretical on Apple Silicon; operators are already running it on M3 Ultra-class desktops and comparing the experience against frontier hosted models.

Runtime/source notes to verify

• Z.ai

  2026-04-30 · vLLM / SGLang

  The official GLM-5 launch post says the model weights are available for local deployment and names vLLM and SGLang as supported serving frameworks, but it does not establish Mac throughput or fit.

Runtime mentions in the field

Hardware mentioned in reports

What would improve confidence

• Reproduce Field Performance Signal
• Resolve Blocked Source Capture