The numbers I was most interested in are tucked away in a chart towards the bottom - the speed comparison of the Mac Studios v.s. a RTX 5090:

  Qwen3.8 27B tokens/sec generation speed

  Prompt size    8K    64K   128K   256K
  RTX 5090 PC    59    51    44     n/a
  M5 Ultra       48    39    32     24
  M3 Ultra       31    23.5  20     15

Those RTX 5090 numbers are bad. You can get over 200 tps with ninfer using NVFP4 and MTP.

A dense 27B doesn't really make sense for the Mac. A MoE makes way more sense when you have modest bandwidth but lots of memory.

Those are some incredible graphs, that leap in prompt processing going from M3 to M5.

Also: ~30 token/s on GLM 5.3-flash, locally. (That's roughly Opus 4.8-tier. I think).

/meta Here's a CSS filter that stops those nuisance chart animations,

    macstories.net##*:style(animation: none !important; transition: none !important)

Thank you for this. I wish Apple focused their silicon design on improving the TTFT metrics but coming from an M3 Pro, it still looks laggard compared to Nvidia's TensorCores in the 5090.

Maybe Apple is an acquisition away from changing that balance.

The selling point of the M5 Ultra Mac Studio is that you can run much larger models that the 5090 can't without swapping. NVidia aggressively segments the market on VRAM for this reason. That's why a 5090 has an MSRP of ~$2k (but good luck getting one for less than $4k) while a 6000 Pro, which is basically a 5090 with 96GB of RAM has now soared beyond $15k where 3-6 months ago it was more like $10-11k. A 6000 Pro has the same memory bandwidth but slightly more CUDA units (IIRC ~24k vs ~21k).

This advantage won't be apparent with a 27B model. The 256GB MS can probably run the newer Flash models locally, something you can't do on a 5090.

I don't think we'll get a successor to the 5090 until late 2028, maybe even 2029. I'm basing this on the launch date of the 5000 series and that we haven't got a midcycle refresh yet. Rumor has it the chips are ready but the 3GB RAM modules are 3-4x the price of the 2GB modules used on the current cards.

Apple should see a Mac Studio major update in 2028. That might even force NVidia's hand. But it's really impossible to say what the state of the market will be 2-3 years from now. It may have completely crashed. I suspect not however.

The interesting thing will be when the bandwidth demands start forcing HBM memory onto these home/enthusiast solutions.