{"id":246927,"date":"2026-05-12T18:12:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T22:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/my-rtx-5090-cant-keep-up-with-apple-silicon-on-the-biggest-local-llms-and-i-hate-to-admit-it\/"},"modified":"2026-05-15T19:10:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T23:10:14","slug":"my-rtx-5090-cant-keep-up-with-apple-silicon-on-the-biggest-local-llms-and-i-hate-to-admit-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/my-rtx-5090-cant-keep-up-with-apple-silicon-on-the-biggest-local-llms-and-i-hate-to-admit-it\/","title":{"rendered":"My RTX 5090 can’t keep up with Apple Silicon on the biggest local LLMs, and I hate to admit it"},"content":{"rendered":"

My RTX 5090 can’t keep up with Apple Silicon on the biggest local LLMs, and I hate to admit it<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.xda-developers.com\/rtx-5090-cant-keep-up-apple-silicon-biggest-local-llms\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-12 18:12:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.xda-developers.com<\/a><\/p>\n

I spent a long time building the gaming PC I wanted, iterating over the last decade and finally landing on a PC that the younger me could have only dreamed of. I’ve got an Nvidia RTX 5090 and an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, and it handles every game that I throw at it without breaking a sweat. On top of that, I do a lot of local heavy computational workloads, like machine learning, data analysis, and development.<\/p>\n

However, as local LLMs have taken off, I’ve been playing around with them and seeing what they can do. I now run them every day, and while I had thought the RTX 5090 would be an incredible beast capable of running them at impossible speeds, I realized something very quickly: it’s fast, but speed isn’t all there is.<\/p>\n

Granted, Qwen 3.6 27B is a phenomenal model, and it fits nicely in the 32GB of VRAM that the RTX 5090 has. But there are other, more interesting models that I’d love to try out, but those are significantly larger than what I can fit in a mere 32GB pool. Unfortunately, I’ve come to realize that Apple Silicon is probably the best mainstream way to get into big local LLMs right now, because the architecture massively benefits the workload in ways that I don’t think even Apple expected when it first brought its Unified Memory Architecture to the market in 2020.<\/p>\n

For the record, I’m not saying that you should go out and buy an Apple Silicon-based machine for local AI, nor am I saying that it’s the only way to run local AI. But it’s pretty funny that Apple, somewhat accidentally, settled on a memory architecture that positioned it as a better alternative to the best consumer GPUs in the world for a very specific purpose. Apple has also started building more explicit tooling for this world with MLX, its machine-learning framework for Apple Silicon. It’s not a CUDA equivalent in maturity or scope, and plenty of local LLM tooling still uses Metal directly, but it shows Apple is aware that unified memory has become one of its strongest AI advantages.<\/p>\n

…
\n
Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My RTX 5090 can’t keep up with Apple Silicon on the biggest local LLMs, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":246928,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/static0.xdaimages.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/wm\/2025\/03\/mac-studio-m3-ultra-review-03.jpg?w=1600&h=900&fit=crop","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-macintosh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246927"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246927"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":246929,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246927\/revisions\/246929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/246928"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}