Gemma 4 26B-A4B on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified)

Yes — M4 Max (36GB Unified) runs Gemma 4 26B-A4B excellently at Q8_0 — 84 tok/s. 36 GB VRAM with plenty of headroom.

Model Size

25.2B

Device VRAM

36 GB

Bandwidth

546 GB/s

Quantization

Q8_0

Benchmarks

Performance by Quantization

OwnRig currently has one published compatibility entry for Gemma 4 26B-A4B on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified) at Q8_0. This is the best supported pairing we can stand behind today.

Quantization	Speed	TTFT	Fits in VRAM	Rating	Confidence
Q8_0	84 tok/s	50ms	✓ Yes	Excellent	estimated

Notes

Q8_0

25.2B model. Q8_0 26.86GB on 36GB apple_silicon.

About Gemma 4 26B-A4B

Gemma 4 26B-A4B (25.2B) is a chat, coding, reasoning, multi-purpose model. Mixture-of-Experts architecture: 25.2B total parameters but only 3.8B active per token (8 selected + 1 shared expert per layer, out of 128 total). Hybrid dense+sparse FFN design. Inference throughput closer to a 4B dense model; quality closer to a 27B dense model. 256K context window. Benchmarks: 88.3% AIME 2026, 82.6% MMLU Pro, 77.1% LiveCodeBench. All 25.2B weights must be loaded into VRAM despite sparse activation; fits on 24 GB GPUs at Q4_K_M. Apache 2.0 licensed.

View all Gemma 4 26B-A4B 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 →

Estimate method: Estimated from MoE active params (3.8B), quantization, and device bandwidth with 0.65 efficiency factor. Reference hardware source: huggingface.co (2026-04-04)

Performance varies by driver version, inference engine, quantization method, context length, and system configuration. Figures shown are estimates based on community benchmarks and may not reflect your exact setup. Product names are trademarks of their respective owners. OwnRig is independent and not affiliated with any hardware or AI model provider.