Are Macs good for running AI models?
Yes, especially for large models. Apple silicon shares one pool of fast unified memory between the CPU and GPU, so a Mac Studio with M5 Ultra can give a model up to 256 GB at 1.2 TB/s. That is more model memory than several high-end graphics cards, in a quiet desktop that draws under 400 W.
Apple’s MLX framework is built for this memory design, and most popular open models are published in MLX formats.
The trade-off is compute. NVIDIA GPUs process long prompts faster. Macs are strongest at generating text, which depends mostly on memory bandwidth.
Clustering extends the advantage: with RDMA over Thunderbolt 5, several Macs can run one model faster than any single Mac.
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