Local and Distributed Large LLM Inference with MLX and RDMA on Mac Studio
MLX on Mac with Apple silicon lets AI researchers and developers experiment locally with the latest models and methods in a private environment. The open-source array framework leverages the unified memory architecture of Apple silicon, enabling anyone to run new inference and fine-tuning methods on their own hardware and explore other AI techniques. In a previous post, we highlighted the advantages of the M5 architecture and its GPU Neural Accelerators.
In this post, we show how to run the latest frontier-class model — Muse Spark Open, with nearly a trillion parameters — right from your desk, using the latest version of MLX, released today. On a cluster of four Mac Studios, Muse Spark Open generates over 36 tokens per second (see Figure 1), well above average human reading speed.
Beginning on a single Mac Studio (up to 512GB of unified memory), then scaling out across multiple Macs with the RDMA over Thunderbolt driver, below we share an overview of the range of models you can now run on Mac Studio.
We benchmark several popular open-weight LLMs on Mac Studio, using the MLX LM package, as described in our prior post. We compare two generations of Mac Studio: the recently released M5 Ultra and the previous generation, M3 Ultra. The M5 generation features the GPU Neural Accelerator, which supports dedicated matrix multiplication operations, essential for many machine learning workloads.
8 (27 B). Muse Spark Open is a mixture of experts (MoE) model, which keeps only a fraction of its experts — and thus parameters — active, reducing compute at inference, and it is evaluated in NVFP4 precision.
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