HARDWARE FIT CHECK โ€ข Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE + Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory)24.1 GB / 54 GB VRAM

Can I Run Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory)?

Full VRAM footprint analysis, tokens/sec generation benchmark, and copy-paste Ollama & vLLM runtime commands for running Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE (35B) on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory) (54 GB).

โœ… Runs 100% in GPU VRAM (Optimal Headroom)24.1 GB (45%)~78 t/s

Model & Target Hardware

interactive
Ultra-Fast 100+ tok/s Coding & Local RAG on 24GB GPUs
Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B MoE on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory)

โœ“ Fits Comfortably in VRAM

โœ“ FITS IN VRAM
Required VRAM
24.1 GB
45% of hardware capacity (54 GB)
Est. Decode Speed
~78 tok/s
3B active params @ 273 GB/s
Available Headroom
+29.9 GB
Safe for OS display & full context
Memory Allocation & Headroom
24.1 GB allocated of 54 GB capacity
45% utilized
Weights: 21 GB
KV: (32K): 1.61 GB
Overhead: 1.49 GB
Free Headroom: +29.9 GB
โšก Architecture & Throughput Transparency: Single-user decode speed (~78 tok/s) is memory-bandwidth bound at batch size = 1 on Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory) (273 GB/s). Prompt prefill / TTFT (~1,131 tok/s) is compute-bound and utilizes GPU Tensor cores. Actual latency varies with FlashAttention-2 and runtime engine (Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp).
OLLAMA_FLASH_ATTENTION=1 OLLAMA_KV_CACHE_TYPE=q8_0 ollama run qwen3.6:35b-a3b

Quantization Precision Matrix

32K ctx โ€ข KV: Q8_0
QuantizationWeightsKV CacheTotal VRAMEst. SpeedFit Status
FP1616 bpw70 GB1.61 GB74.81 GB (139%)0 t/sOOM
Q8_08.5 bpw37.1 GB1.61 GB40.76 GB (75%)~48 t/sFITS
Q6_K6.56 bpw28.7 GB1.61 GB32.06 GB (59%)~60 t/sFITS
Q5_K_M5.68 bpw24.85 GB1.61 GB28.08 GB (52%)~68 t/sFITS
Q4_K_M4.8 bpw21 GB1.61 GB24.1 GB (45%)~78 t/sFITS
FP44.25 bpw18.55 GB1.61 GB21.56 GB (40%)~86 t/sFITS
IQ3_XS3.3 bpw14.35 GB1.61 GB17.21 GB (32%)~105 t/sFITS

Local Hardware Configurations & Pricing

High-bandwidth VRAM specs and current market prices
Apple Silicon54 GB VRAM

Apple Mac Mini M4 Pro (64GB Unified Memory)

Silent 65W desktop running 32Bโ€“70B models with large KV context

273 GB/s65W TDP
Consumer GPU32 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)

Maximum tokens/sec on 27Bโ€“35B models & Blackwell FP4 quantization

1792 GB/s575W TDP
Consumer GPU24 GB VRAM

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 (24GB GDDR6X)

The 24GB CUDA enthusiast standard for 14Bโ€“32B Q4_K_M models

1008 GB/s450W TDP
Multi-GPU Rig48 GB VRAM

2x NVIDIA RTX 3090 Dual Rig (48GB Total VRAM)

Best price-to-VRAM homelab rig for 70B Q4_K_M & Qwen 3.8 27B Q8

936 GB/s700W TDP

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