Can the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning fits the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max's 48 GB at Q4_K_M (about 11.8 GB needed), running at an estimated 31 tok/s. There's room for up to FP16 if you want higher quality.
Every quantization
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (17.8B) on 48 GB
| Quant | Weights | Needs | Fit | Est. speed |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_M | 10 GB | 11.8 GB | Fits easily | ~31 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | 13 GB | 14.8 GB | Fits easily | ~24 tok/s |
| Q8_0 | 19 GB | 20.8 GB | Fits easily | ~16 tok/s |
| FP16 | 36 GB | 37.8 GB | Fits | ~8.7 tok/s |
Estimates. Needs = weights + 1.8 GB for KV cache and runtime at modest context. Speed is single-stream decode scaled from the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max's 546 GB/s bandwidth (Estimated from memory bandwidth (llama.cpp decode)). Long contexts need more memory and run slower.
Compare
Same model, other hardware - and other models on this card
Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on other hardware
- RTX 5090~103 tok/s
- RTX 5090 D~103 tok/s
- RTX 6000D~90 tok/s
- RTX 4090~63 tok/s
- RTX 3090~55 tok/s
- Radeon RX 7900 XTX~55 tok/s
- RTX 5080~55 tok/s
- RTX 3080 Ti~52 tok/s
Also runs on the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max
- deepseek-v4-flash-0731-spark~8.9 tok/s
- Qwen3.6 35B A3B~119 tok/s
- dolphin-2.9.1-yi-1.5-34b~16 tok/s
- Laguna-XS-2.1~16 tok/s
- Gemma 4 31B~16 tok/s
- OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT~16 tok/s
- Qwen3 32B~16 tok/s
- OTel-2.0-LLM-31B-IT-QLoRA~17 tok/s
Frequently asked
Quick answers
Can the Apple MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max run Nemotron 3.5 Lightning?
Yes. Nemotron 3.5 Lightning fits the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max's 48 GB at Q4_K_M (about 11.8 GB needed), running at an estimated 31 tok/s. There's room for up to FP16 if you want higher quality.
How much VRAM does Nemotron 3.5 Lightning need?
About 10 GB of weights at Q4_K_M, 19 GB at Q8_0 and 36 GB at FP16. Add roughly 1.8 GB for the KV cache and runtime at modest context lengths.
How fast is Nemotron 3.5 Lightning on the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max?
Roughly 31 tokens per second at Q4_K_M (single user, llama.cpp-style decode). This is an estimate from the MacBook Pro 16" M4 Max's 546 GB/s memory bandwidth.