Gemma 4 26B A4B Outperforms Qwen 3.5 35B on Apple Silicon

Direct performance comparison on Apple Silicon reveals a significant efficiency advantage for Gemma 4. Testing on Mac Studio M1 Ultra shows the Gemma 4 26B A4B quantization achieving ~1000 tokens/sec prompt throughput and ~60 tokens/sec generation speed at 20K context length—matching the performance of Qwen 3.5 35B despite being 26% smaller.

Beyond raw throughput, users report substantially better qualitative behavior and chain-of-thought reasoning in Gemma 4, describing the gap as "not even close." This makes Gemma 4 the superior choice for Mac-based local deployment where both speed and output quality matter. The A4B quantization (aggressive 4-bit) maintains quality across real-world tasks.

For MacBook and Mac Studio users, this represents a significant upgrade path: deploy smaller, faster models without quality compromise, extending battery life on laptops while maintaining inference capabilities that rival or exceed larger competitors.

Source: r/LocalLLaMA · Relevance: 7/10