LLM Roofline
Apple · UMA · Backend: mlx

Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) — LLM Sizing & Speed Matrix

273 GB/s LPDDR5X; strong sweet spot for 32B Q4/Q6 and 30B-A3B MoE on desktop.

Reference Pricing
$1,799 Street
Usable Memory
37.44 GiB (42.24 tuned)
Memory Bandwidth
273 GB/s (74% eff.)
FP16 Compute
18.4 TFLOPS
Roofline Ridge
52.8 FLOP/B
Power (Load / Idle)
95W / 8W

Buy or Rent Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB)

Vendor & Cloud Links
Mac Mini M4 Pro on Amazon
Amazon · Direct Hardware
↗
Mac Mini M4 Pro at B&H Photo
B&H Photo · Direct Hardware
↗

All 32 Open-Weight Models on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) (Q4_K_M @ 32k)

Model Status Weights Total @ 32k Decode TTFT (4k) Max Safe Ctx
Mixtral 8x7B Instruct COMFORTABLE 26.9 GiB 32.0 GiB 14.5 tok/s 10.35s 32k
Qwen3 32B COMFORTABLE 18.9 GiB 28.1 GiB 7.0 tok/s 26.86s 40k
Qwen2.5 Coder 32B COMFORTABLE 18.9 GiB 28.1 GiB 7.0 tok/s 26.24s 32k
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 32B COMFORTABLE 18.9 GiB 28.1 GiB 7.0 tok/s 26.24s 88k
QwQ 32B Reasoning COMFORTABLE 18.9 GiB 28.1 GiB 7.0 tok/s 26.24s 40k
GLM-4 32B 0414 COMFORTABLE 18.6 GiB 21.9 GiB 9.2 tok/s 26.01s 32k
Qwen3 30B-A3B COMFORTABLE 17.6 GiB 21.4 GiB 33.8 tok/s 3.19s 40k
Gemma 3 27B IT COMFORTABLE 15.8 GiB 20.0 GiB 10.1 tok/s 21.87s 128k
Mistral Small 3.1 24B COMFORTABLE 13.8 GiB 20.1 GiB 10.0 tok/s 18.97s 128k
Codestral 22B COMFORTABLE 12.8 GiB 21.2 GiB 9.5 tok/s 18.16s 32k
Qwen3 14B COMFORTABLE 8.5 GiB 14.8 GiB 13.9 tok/s 12.04s 40k
Qwen2.5 14B Instruct COMFORTABLE 8.5 GiB 15.8 GiB 12.9 tok/s 12.17s 32k
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Qwen 14B COMFORTABLE 8.5 GiB 15.8 GiB 12.9 tok/s 12.17s 128k
Phi-4 14B COMFORTABLE 8.5 GiB 12.8 GiB 16.2 tok/s 11.96s 16k
Gemma 3 12B IT COMFORTABLE 7.0 GiB 10.4 GiB 20.1 tok/s 10.02s 128k
Qwen3 8B COMFORTABLE 4.7 GiB 10.3 GiB 20.4 tok/s 6.79s 40k
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct COMFORTABLE 4.6 GiB 9.7 GiB 21.8 tok/s 6.61s 128k
Qwen2.5 7B Instruct COMFORTABLE 4.4 GiB 7.2 GiB 30.7 tok/s 6.18s 32k
Gemma 3 4B IT COMFORTABLE 2.5 GiB 4.2 GiB 56.4 tok/s 3.56s 128k
Llama-3.3 Nemotron Super 49B TIGHT 28.7 GiB 36.5 GiB 5.4 tok/s 39.60s 62k
DeepSeek-R1 671B OOM 386.4 GiB 390.1 GiB OOM — OOM
DeepSeek-V3 671B OOM 386.4 GiB 390.1 GiB OOM — OOM
Llama 3.1 405B Instruct OOM 233.8 GiB 252.3 GiB OOM — OOM
Llama 4 Maverick 400B-A17B OOM 231.5 GiB 238.8 GiB OOM — OOM
Qwen3 235B-A22B OOM 135.4 GiB 142.4 GiB OOM — OOM
Mixtral 8x22B Instruct OOM 81.2 GiB 89.6 GiB OOM — OOM
Command A 111B OOM 63.9 GiB 68.9 GiB OOM — OOM
Llama 4 Scout 109B-A17B OOM 62.8 GiB 70.0 GiB OOM — OOM
Qwen2.5 72B Instruct OOM 41.9 GiB 53.5 GiB OOM — OOM
DeepSeek-R1 Distill Llama 70B OOM 40.7 GiB 52.3 GiB OOM — 2k
Llama 3.3 70B Instruct OOM 40.7 GiB 52.3 GiB OOM — 2k
Llama 3.1 70B Instruct OOM 40.7 GiB 52.3 GiB OOM — 2k

Interactive Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) Simulator

46.7B (12.9B active) · GQA
273 GB/s · 18.4 TFLOPS
3. Weight Quantization 4.85 bpw
4. KV Cache
32,768 tok
Compute Roofline
COMFORTABLE FIT Memory-Bandwidth Bound
Max Safe Ctx: 32k
Memory Allocation Footprint 32.01 / 37.44 GiB usable
Weights: 26.89 GiB KV Cache: 4.00 GiB Overhead: 1.11 GiB Headroom: 5.43 GiB
Decode Speed
14.5
tok/s (batch=1)
Prefill Speed
397
prompt tok/s
TTFT Latency
10.35s
for 4,096 tok
Active Params
12.9B
of 46.7B total
llama.cpp Server Command 
llama-server -hf mistralai/Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct-v0.1:Q4_K_M -ngl 99 -fa on -c 32768 --port 8080
Context KV Cache Total VRAM Decode Status
4k 0.50 GiB 28.23 GiB 20.9 tok/s COMFORTABLE
8k 1.00 GiB 29.01 GiB 19.6 tok/s COMFORTABLE
16k 2.00 GiB 30.01 GiB 17.6 tok/s COMFORTABLE
32k 4.00 GiB 32.01 GiB 14.5 tok/s COMFORTABLE

Buy-vs-Cloud-vs-API Monthly TCO Break-Even

USE SERVERLESS API
Own Hardware/mo
$38.58
322.5h active + power
Cloud GPU/mo
$330.11
@$0.89/hr spot/pod
Serverless API/mo
$15.60
Payback: 123.1 mo

Recommended Hardware & Cloud Deployment

Contextual to fit status

Hardware FAQ — Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB)

How much usable VRAM / GPU memory does Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) actually provide for LLMs?

Out of the box, Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) safely reserves 37.44 GiB for GPU inference, expandable up to 42.24 GiB with OS UMA tuning.

What is the largest Q4_K_M model Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) can run at 32k context?

With Q4_K_M weights and FP16 KV cache at 32k context, the largest fitting model in our verified catalog on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (48 GB) is Mixtral 8x7B Instruct (46.7B total).