Ask HN: Which laptop can run the largest LLM model?
3grokblah48/14/2025, 4:30:31 PM
I’d like to experiment with LLMs locally and understand their infrastructure better.
Comments (4)
PaulHoule · 3h ago
Don’t the M-series processors for Mac book pro’s have a huge amount of HBM which is good for models? I see you can get a pro with 48MB of unified memory whereas Alienware will sell you a machine with 32GB of regular ram and 24GB of graphics RAM on a 5090 discrete GPU. So the pro has twice the RAM accessible to the GPU.
grokblah · 1h ago
Looks like the MacBook Pro might be more cost effective? I like the support for larger models. Thanks!
The out of stock one has 128gb of unified system ram. AMD 395 ai chip.
So easily run 70B models on that much vram; but slower, probably in that 30-40tokens/s which is very usable.
Qwen 3 30b will be in that 60 tokens/s range.
llama 4 scout will be around 20-30tokens/s
That’s the same price as an M4 Max MBP with the same ram and storage. Any idea how they compare in performance?