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Comment by immutlex | Hacker News Reader

Has any individual/SMB purchased this yet? Aware the ROI isn't there for most individuals that don't heavily use LLM for coding or multi agentic workflows -- but for those that it does make sense this is ~$68k cheaper than the next alternative making this the most realistic option for consumer grade access to frontier models.

Specifically interested if anyone has ran GLM-5.3 (753B MoE) in 4-bit on a 512GB Mac Studio. Looking for real world usage numbers and/or any benchmarks you might have performed.

Thanks!

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They haven't shipped yet (people who purchased the moment it became available have delivery dates near the end of the month). That said you can estimate it's speed by looking at the 256GB version for models with similar numbers of active parameters (GLM 5.3 has 40B active parameters). So for 4-bit you could compare to what people are getting Qwen3.8 27B at 8-bit (which is around 2000 tok/s prefill and 70-80tok/s token generation [1]). It might be a little higher or a little lower due to the different architecture and kernel optimizations.

[1]: https://omlx.ai/benchmarks/performance?model=qwen3.8+27b&chi...

GLM-5.3 would be bottlenecked by the M5's GPU, here. I don't have any hard numbers, but Apple Silicon is known for weak prefill performance on larger models (yes, even MoEs).

Good to know. Private GLM-5.3 is really the one use-case I can imagine for a system like this - It does very well with cybersecurity tasks, which are either blocked for most people by current providers, or on their way to getting blocked based on the regulatory/political trends. Such a capability could become very valuable when supply becomes artificially limited, although I expect the Chinese labs will be the last hold-outs. Imagine not being able to do security hardening on your own tech because government-imposed guardrails decide your legitimate prompts appear "risky". In such a world, what would an unconstrained cyber-capable model be worth?

I think 2xGB10 might be a better option but don't quote me on that.

is this a hardware or software limitation?

Both. Apple Silicon could have the best of both worlds if it supported dGPU/eGPU tech, but Apple depreciated that about a decade ago. So you're stuck with fast RAM and a slow GPU.

Crescent island will be cheaper and might ship earlier. It could also be faster.

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