M5 Max vs M3 Max Inference Benchmarks — Qwen3.5 Performance Comparison Across Three Model Sizes

r/LocalLLaMA·low signal

A practitioner ran identical benchmarks on both 16-inch MacBook Pros (M5 Max and M3 Max, both 40 GPU cores, 128GB unified memory) across Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B MoE, 35B-A3B MoE, and 27B dense models using oMLX v0.2.23. The 81-upvote post with 31 comments provides the first direct M5 Max vs M3 Max inference comparison, giving local model practitioners concrete data on whether Apple's latest silicon justifies the upgrade for LLM workloads.