Mixtral 8x7B Instruct on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified)
Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified) handles Mixtral 8x7B Instruct well at 20 tok/s at Q4_K_M. A solid choice for this model.
Model Size
46.7B
Device VRAM
36 GB
Bandwidth
546 GB/s
Quantizations Tested
1
Performance by Quantization
Each row shows Mixtral 8x7B Instruct performance at a different quality level on Apple M4 Max (36GB Unified).
| Quantization | Speed | TTFT | Fits in VRAM | Rating | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 20 tok/s | 500ms | ✓ Yes | Good | estimated |
Notes
Q4_K_M
Q4 at 26.2GB fits in 36GB unified memory. MoE sparsity gives good speed despite total param count.
About Mixtral 8x7B Instruct
Mixtral 8x7B Instruct (46.7B) is a chat, coding, reasoning, multi-purpose model. Mixture of Experts model — 46.7B total params but only ~12.9B active per token. Excellent quality-to-speed ratio. Despite large total params, inference speed closer to a 13B model. Needs more VRAM for the full weight set though.
View all Mixtral 8x7B Instruct 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 MoE reports (2026-01-15)
Data last updated: 2026-03-01