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DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified)

Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified) runs DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B excellently at 52 tok/s at Q4_K_M. This is a strong pairing.

Model Size

7.62B

Device VRAM

36 GB

Bandwidth

546 GB/s

Quantizations Tested

1

Performance by Quantization

Each row shows DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B performance at a different quality level on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified).

QuantizationSpeedTTFTFits in VRAMRatingConfidence
Q4_K_M52 tok/s145ms✓ YesExcellentestimated

Notes

Q4_K_M

M4 Max bandwidth delivers strong performance for 7B reasoning model.

About DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B

DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B (7.62B) is a reasoning, chat model. Compact distilled reasoning model for chat and inference.

View all DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 7B hardware options →

About Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified)

Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified) has 36 GB at 546 GB/s. Available in MacBook Pro 16", Mac Studio.

See all models Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified) can run →

Source: MLX performance estimates (2026-03-01)

Data last updated: 2026-03-15