Mac Studio M4 Max · 128 GB · local benchmarks
Every dashboard, report and demo on this site, grouped by line of work. Each card says what the page shows and when it was last updated.
Campaigns bench/qwen38-flashnext-daily-driver-2026-09 and
bench/engine-updates-2026-10: quant × runtime combinations of Flash-Next (MoE), to pick the most
responsive setup. Verdict from 2026-10-07: ddalcu iQ-MLX 4.7 bpw on mlx-serve 26.10.1. Daily driver since 2026-10-11: Swift 1.5 on
the same runtime.
Public summary for readers outside this repo: five servers from 8K to 1M, agent turn time, prompt cache reuse, memory, a quality check and the commands. mlx-serve: 8.8 s per agent turn at 128K and 13.0 s at 512K. Splash 1.4.0 with Swift 1.5: 6.7 s at 512K and 9.3 s at 1M, but a change halfway re-prefills the whole prompt.
How many agent sessions fit on one Flash-Next server?Public summary for readers outside this repo: what happens to speed and waiting time when two, three or four agent sessions share one local server, and how to set up the launcher for it. 2 sessions is the maximum; each runs about 2× slower; running two together saves no total time.
Campaign dashboard, October 2026Four runtimes: headline numbers, bars per metric, gates per band, test coverage, a cheap quality check (HumanEval, tool calls) and the September uncensored stage. n2 wins with T_turn 8.23 s at 32K and 8.84 s at 128K.
Five runtimes from 8K to 1MOctober 2026 stack: mlx-serve 26.10.1 and 26.10.3, oMLX 0.7.0, MTPLX 2.12.2, ds4 and Splash 1.4.0. Lines per context for T_turn, warm TTFT, cold TTFT, decode, prefill and wired memory. Splash has the lowest T_turn in every band and is the only runtime at 1M; mlx-serve leads the four runtimes of the engine round; MTPLX refuses 256K (planned fit 237,568 tokens).
Where the thinking-effort line goesThe effort line first or last in the prompt, on Swift 1.5 and iQ-MLX: effort switch at 128K, prefix reuse on short prompts, obedience per level, time and tokens per question. Last: the switch drops from 167 s to 0.8–5.8 s and accuracy holds, but short prompts lose the shared prefix (53/55 → 0/55 reused).
Swift 1.5 vs iQ-MLXTwo 4.7-bit MLX packs of Qwen3.8-Flash-Next on mlx-serve 26.10.1: time per question as dot plots, tokens and generation speed, accuracy on six suites. Same accuracy; with the recommended sampling, 2–3× less time to the final answer on GPQA and LiveCodeBench, because Swift 1.5 thinks with fewer tokens.
Responsive driver — scoreboardThe campaign's first dashboard: verdict in prose, scoreboard per band, T_turn and TTFT lines, cache hit per scenario, wired memory and the 512K probe.
The dense 27B campaign: selection of runtime, quant, prefix cache and speculation. The September pages are kept as they were and are not maintained.
Campaign dashboard: sustained decode per arm, runtimes and quants, tests, gate verdicts, queue and coverage matrix.
End-to-end speed to 256KFive configurations that reached the native context: decode, prefill, warm and cold effective throughput, total wait, peak RAM and cache hit per scenario.
Dense Qwen3.8-27B on an M4 Max: which server runs it fastest? (Oct 2026)Splash 1.3.1 + DFlash2 is the fastest of three servers: 17.7 s (thinking effort xhigh) / 15.9 s (medium) per agent turn at 128K, 0.69× the mlx-dspark baseline, still about 2× Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (8.6 s). mlx-serve 26.10.2 was slower than the baseline. Funnel, run command, limitations.
Speed and quality of local models measured on this rig, compared with frontier models.
One-page summary of the 9 datasets: decode by model size, long-context wait, quality, hallucination and RAG, reasoning probes, cross-harness consistency and SVG quality. It was the site's landing page until 2026-09-14.
On-rig measurementsAccuracy (n=100), LiveCodeBench (n=50), tool calling, throughput, speed probe, prefill and elapsed time of the local models on LM Studio / MLX. Filters by model, tier, architecture and quant.
Local quality vs frontierPublished scores (MMLU-Pro, GPQA, SWE-V, AIME, LCB v6, T-Bench, MMMU) of the local models against frontier and open-weight reference models.
Terminal-Bench 2.0 scoreboardRanking of 9 local models and an 89-task × 9-model matrix: who solved what, by category, difficulty and time budget.
What local and frontier models produce inside coding harnesses from the same prompt: SVG drawings, a game and landing pages. Also field performance from day-to-day opencode use.
84 SVGs from 6 harness × model pairs, graded requirement by requirement by a single judge: leaderboard, head-to-head, per-question detail and a filterable gallery.
SVGBench contact sheet: gpt-5.6-sol28 SVGs from Codex × gpt-5.6-sol on seven SVGBench prompts, four takes each (v1, v2, v3 and animated). Unscored: a gallery to compare the takes side by side.
Agent Build-OffFive agent stacks build the same 3D game from the same brief in one session: time, output tokens, lines shipped, bundle size and defects found.
Layout Skill BenchOne local model (Qwen3.8-Flash-Next), three design skills and a no-skill baseline build five landing-page iterations: time, output tokens and the pages side by side.
opencode — field usage metricsPerformance observed in day-to-day opencode use, per model and provider: TPS, TTFT, prefill, TPS per context, context size, cache hit and cost. Field usage, not a controlled benchmark.
Artifacts galleryQwen3.8-Flash-Next's work next to frontier models' work on the same tasks: graded SVG drawings, the built games and the landing pages, each with its numbers. 112 drawings from four newer pairs (gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-6-astra and two DeepSeek models) have no verdict yet and are marked unscored.
The builds the agents delivered, published as they are. They run in the browser.
The Agent Build-Off 3D game built by opencode with local Qwen3.8.
Build-Off · opencode + Qwen3.8 + superpowersThe same stack with the superpowers skills enabled.
Build-Off · Claude Code + Qwen3.8The 3D game built by Claude Code running local Qwen3.8.
Build-Off · Claude Code + Opus 5The 3D game built by Claude Code with hosted Claude Opus 5.
Build-Off · Codex + gpt-6-astraThe 3D game built by Codex with hosted gpt-6-astra (multi-model).
Layout · design-skillFive Layout Skill Bench landing pages built with the design skill, with a switcher between them.
Layout · taste-skillFive Layout Skill Bench landing pages built with the taste skill.
Layout · taste2Five Layout Skill Bench landing pages built with the second version of the taste skill.
Layout · vanilla (no skill)Five Layout Skill Bench landing pages from the baseline run, built without a design skill.
No work matches the filter.