Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to On the edge of Apple Silicon memory speeds
I have developed open source CLI-tool for Apple Silicon macOS. It measures memory speeds in different ways and also latency. It can achieve up to 96-97% efficiency on read speed on M4 base what is advertised as 120GB/s. All memory operations are in assembly. I would really appreciate for results on different CPU's how benchmark works on those. I have been able to test this on M1 and M4. command : 'memory_benchmark -non-cacheable -count 5 -output results.JSON' (close all applications before running) This will generate JSON file where you find sections copy_gb_s, read_gb_s and write_gb_s…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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Hi HN, I built a specialized inference engine for running 4-bit Gemma 4 26B-A4B-IT on any M-series Mac using about 2 GB of RAM. It is called TurboFieldfare and is written in Swift and Metal. I have always adored on-device AI. It feels like magic that you can run a powerful NN on your Mac or iPhone. So I wanted to push the limits a bit and run a model whose weights don’t fit in memory. The model’s 4-bit quantized weights occupy roughly 14 GB, which makes running it with conventional inference tools almost impossible on an 8 GB or even 16 GB Mac once the OS, applications, and KV cache are…
Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Take a speedtest from your Mac's Menu Bar
2017 · speedtest.net · its alternatives →
- 3FS
Cold-cache Sequential IO Benchmark
2017 · ccsiobench.com · its alternatives →
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I discovered that in LLM inference, keys and values in the KV cache have very different quantization sensitivities. Keys need higher precision than values to maintain quality. I patched llama.cpp to enable different bit-widths for keys vs. values on Apple Silicon. The results are surprising: - K8V4 (8-bit keys, 4-bit values): 59% memory reduction with only 0.86% perplexity loss - K4V8 (4-bit keys, 8-bit values): 59% memory reduction but 6.06% perplexity loss - The configurations use the same number of bits, but K8V4 is 7× better for quality This means you can run LLMs with 2-3× longer…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Spin up a Mac Mini M1 in the cloud.
2021 · scaleway.com · its alternatives →
- 6WM
Pick a Mac and a model, get the memory it needs and the tokens/sec to expect. Covers M1 to M6, every unified memory size, Q4 to FP16. Formula fitted and validated on our own measurements on two machines.
7d ago · macyou.co · its alternatives →
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Pick hardware and a model, and feel the real speed of a local LLM before you buy. Simulates tokens/sec and time-to-first-token from verified benchmarks for GPUs, Macs, and more.
7d ago · llmspeed.dev · its alternatives →
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Hey Folks! I've been building an open source benchmark for measuring local LLM performance on your own hardware. The benchmarking tool is a CLI written on top of Llamafile to allow for portability across different hardware setups and operating systems. The website is a database of results from the benchmark, allowing you to explore the performance of different models and hardware configurations. Please give it a try! Any feedback and contribution is much appreciated. I'd love for this to serve as a helpful resource for the local AI community. For more check out: - Website:…
2025 · localscore.ai · its alternatives →
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speed-test-cli▲315Test your download speed using SpeedTest on the command-line
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Built this for my LLM workflows - needed searchable, persistent memory that wouldn't blow up storage costs. I also wanted to use it locally for my research. It's a content-addressed storage system with block-level deduplication (saves 30-40% on typical codebases). I have integrated the CLI tool into most of my workflows in Zed, Claude Code, and Cursor, and I provide the prompt I'm currently using in the repo. The project is in C++ and the build system is rough around the edges but is tested on macOS and Ubuntu 24.04.
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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About six months ago, I started working on a project to fine-tune Whisper locally on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio with a limited compute budget. I got into it. The problem I had at the time was I had 15,000 hours of audio data in Google Cloud Storage, and there was no way I could fit all the audio onto my local machine, so I built a system to stream data from my GCS to my machine during training. Gemma 3n came out, so I added that. Kinda went nuts, tbh. Then I put it on the shelf. When Gemma 4 came out a few days ago, I dusted it off, cleaned it up, broke out the Gemma part from the Whisper…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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I built slotstream, a way to run Qwen3.8-Flash-Next 4-bit on a low-memory mac starting from 16GB, a 125B parameter model that would need 100GB+ memory/RAM, thanks to expert-offloading/ssd-streaming. Easy to install/update, and mac-native using MLX and Swift. It ships with auto-mode, which makes a good tradeoff between memory usage and speed. I'll be implementing and porting the MTP module for speculative decoding next Local models really are the future of computing!
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Curated App Benchmark Videos for Apple Silicon and Apple M1
2020 · doesitarm.com · its alternatives →
- 16TA
1. Single universal binary, that can be natively executed on every hardware platform Mac OS X was made for (32/64 bit, PowerPC/x86/AppleSilicon). 2. Minimalistic gadget-style design. If launched as a tool, there is no menubar, no dock icon, no nothing, just the clock window. 3. Support for hidpi and dark mode for environments, that have them. 4. Window title bar for moving the window with a mouse, and a handle to resize it (latter for OS versions, that have it). 5. Can be easily ported to GNUStep and thus other OSes (sources under GPLv3). 6. Simple Makefile build system.
2022 · tycho.sytes.net · its alternatives →
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Run processes on the "Icestorm" efficiency cores of the M1 Mac chip - runbg.swift
2021 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
- 19
A fun toy memory allocator (not thread safe, that's a future TODO). I also wanted to explain how I approached it, so I also wrote a tutorial blog post (~20 minute read) covering the code which you can find the link to in the README.
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
Benchi is a CLI tool for running benchmarks and collecting metrics. It's using Docker Compose to orchestrate the infrastructure and tools being benchmarked, making it repeatable and runnable on different machines. It allows you to run the same benchmark for different tools and compare the collected results. The repository contains a simple example. For a more elaborate example see how we use Benchi to compare data pipelines running on Conduit and Kafka Connect, two data streaming tools (still work in progress): https://github.com/ConduitIO/streaming-benchmarks
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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MacMonitor▲106Real-time Apple Silicon system monitor for your menu bar
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
MacSentinel▲90Find what’s slowing your Mac then clean it safely
Sep 2026 · sentinel.digital · its alternatives →
- 24
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- Speedtest by Ookla, for Mac alternatives
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- Apple Silicon M1 as a Service alternatives
- Which Mac runs which LLM, and how fast alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →