Qwen3.5-397B-A17B Apple Silicon benchmark and best Macs

Runtime support mentioned

Official specs

• Type: Causal Language Model with Vision Encoder.
• Scale: 397B in total and 17B activated.
• Context: 262,144 natively and extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens.
• Total parameters: 397B in total and 17B activated.
• Max input: 262,144 natively and extensible up to 1,010,000 tokens.

Official takeaways

• Unified Vision-Language Foundation: Early fusion training on multimodal tokens achieves cross-generational parity with Qwen3 and outperforms Qwen3-VL models across reasoning, coding, agents, and visual understanding ben…
• Efficient Hybrid Architecture: Gated Delta Networks combined with sparse Mixture-of-Experts deliver high-throughput inference with minimal latency and cost overhead.
• Scalable RL Generalization: Reinforcement learning scaled across million-agent environments with progressively complex task distributions for robust real-world adaptability.
• Global Linguistic Coverage: Expanded support to 201 languages and dialects, enabling inclusive, worldwide deployment with nuanced cultural and regional understanding.

What practitioners keep saying

• The post identifies Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-UD-IQ2_XXS on a MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB, a roughly 106GB GGUF footprint, llama.cpp serving with --ctx-size 16384, and iogpu.wired_limit_mb=122880 to make the 16K context run fit.
• The posted llama.cpp sample reports 122.46 tok/s prompt processing for 33 prompt tokens and 30.81 tok/s generation for 2458 generated tokens.
• The author says prompt processing varies with batching, so that range should stay methodology context rather than a separate exact field row.

Apple Silicon field sources

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-04-13 · MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · llama.cpp

  A cupel follow-up reports Qwen3.5-397B-A17B-UD-IQ2_XXS running through llama.cpp on an M5 Max 128GB MacBook Pro with a measured decode sample and important memory and sustained-load caveats.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-03-26 · Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · MLX

  A Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB owner reports Qwen3.5-397B-A17B running locally on MLX 6-bit, which pushes the Apple Silicon stretch frontier far past speculative fit.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-03-26 · MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · flash-moe

  A follow-up M5 Max 128GB flash-moe benchmark turns Qwen3.5-397B-A17B from a vague stretch-tier experiment into a measured laptop result, with the best 4-bit run reaching 12.99 tok/s locally.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-03-22 · Mac Studio M3 Ultra 512GB · MLX

  Operators report that even when Qwen3.5-397B-A17B technically fits on an M3 Ultra 512GB Mac Studio, practical coding use is still uncomfortable enough that it remains a stretch-tier watch model.

• r/LocalLLaMA

  2026-03-21 · MacBook Pro M5 Max 128GB · flash-moe

  Practitioners report that Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is at least experimentally runnable on M5 Max 128GB Apple Silicon with single-digit generation speed.

Runtime mentions in the field

Hardware mentioned in reports

What would improve confidence

• Expand Cross Chip Benchmark Coverage
• Reproduce Field Performance Signal
• Upgrade To First Party Measurement