Llama vs Qwen — On Apple Silicon
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct vs Qwen 2.5 14B Instruct. Which runs better on your Mac? Measured tok/s across 44 chips, Q4_K - Medium quantization.
Speed comparison — 44 chips, Q4_K - Medium
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct (Q4) vs Qwen 2.5 14B Instruct (Q4) on the same chip. The ratio column shows how much faster Llama runs — smaller models always run faster at the same quant level, but Qwen 2.5 14B offers better quality.
Data from LocalScore community benchmarks. Both at Q4_K - Medium quantization. Source: benchmarks.json.
When to choose Llama vs Qwen on Apple Silicon
Choose Llama 3.1 8B when:
- You have 8–16 GB RAM — it fits comfortably, 14B is tighter
- Speed matters more than quality: ~2× faster generation than 14B
- Running a coding assistant where latency matters most
- You want to step up to Q8 (only ~9 GB for Q8 8B)
- Serving multiple concurrent requests on limited RAM
Choose Qwen 2.5 14B when:
- You have 16 GB+ RAM to spare
- Quality matters: 14B is noticeably better at reasoning and instruction following
- You want strong multilingual support (Qwen is excellent in Chinese/English)
- Running longer conversations where context quality accumulates
- Research or writing tasks where output quality is the bottleneck
Consider Qwen 3 instead of Qwen 2.5
- Qwen 3 8B matches or exceeds Qwen 2.5 14B quality in many benchmarks
- Qwen 3 4B MoE at 2.5 GB is surprisingly capable for its size
- Qwen 3 30B A3B (MoE) runs at 18 GB — similar footprint to a 14B dense model
- M4 Max benchmarks: Qwen 3 30B A3B at 92 tok/s Q4 on 16 GB RAM
The 8B vs 14B quality gap
- For simple chat and Q&A: 8B is usually sufficient
- For complex reasoning, writing, and code generation: 14B has a visible edge
- Instruction following: Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5 are both well-tuned at their respective sizes
- Qwen 3 32B is where quality becomes clearly superior — but requires 64 GB+ for comfort
The 2× speed premium on Llama makes it the better daily-driver choice for most interactive workloads. If you find the quality lacking on complex tasks, step up to Qwen 2.5 14B — it fits in 16 GB and the quality gap is meaningful. If you have 24+ GB, consider Qwen 3 8B or Qwen 3 30B A3B (MoE) for a better quality-per-RAM tradeoff than Qwen 2.5 14B dense.
Browse individual model benchmarks
Related guides
Data
benchmarks.json — full dataset · models.json — model summaries