Apple Silicon LLM Inference Optimization: The Complete Guide to Maximum Performance

TL;DR: MLX is 20-87% faster than llama.cpp for generation on Apple Silicon (under 14B params). Use Ollama 0.19+ with the MLX backend for 93% faster decode with zero config. Q4_K_M is the sweet spot quantization (3.3% quality loss, 75% size reduction). On a 32GB Mac, top picks include Qwen 3.5 9B (daily driver), DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B (reasoning), Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B (MoE), and OpenAI gpt-oss-20b — but the "best" model depends on your use case, context length needs, and quality tolerance. Memory ba...