I very recently ran the numbers on these GPUs for an upcoming blog post. The token generation performance is bad, but the prefill performance is _really_ bad.

For a Qwen 3.6 35B / 3B MoE, 4-bit quant:

- parsing a 4k prompt on a M4 Macbook Air takes 17 seconds before generating a single token.

- on an M4 Max Mac Studio it's faster at 2.3 seconds

- on an RTX 5090, it's 142ms.

RTX 5090 uses more power than an M4 Max Mac Studio but it's not 16x more power.

Somehow Apple has always been able to sell their stuff as somehow Magic. Remember the megahertz myth? Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.

On Geekbench 5, the M1 hits 483 FPS and the RTX 3090 hits 504 FPS.

There are other workloads where the M1 actually beats the 3090.

Apple does plenty of hyping but it's always cute when irrational haters like you put them down. The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.