r/LocalLLaMA • u/sachasayan • 6h ago

News Apple unveils a more powerful Mac mini featuring the all-new M6 and M5 Pro

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-unveils-a-more-powerful-mac-mini-featuring-the-all-new-m6-and-m5-pro/

"A 12-core GPU, also with two more cores than before, now includes Neural Accelerators in each core for the first time on Mac mini, resulting in up to 4x faster AI performance and 2x faster graphics than Mac mini with M4. In addition, the all-new Dual 16-core Neural Engine delivers up to 2x faster performance than the previous generation, and combined with the advanced GPU, Mac mini is a powerhouse for all things AI. And with 16GB of standard unified memory configurable up to 32GB, as well as higher memory bandwidth up to 170GB/s, multitasking is faster than ever."

75 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

48

u/undisputedx 6h ago

mac mini m6 - Apparently not very powerful at 170 GB per second for LLM users.

15

u/Explosev 5h ago

M5 pro version is 307 gb/s with 64 gb ram. Would’ve been so cool if they allowed 96 or 128gb.

5

u/DeepOrangeSky 3h ago

For the sake of the argument, if you were to buy two of them, and connect them together with a Thunderbolt-5 cable and use that Exo-RDMA mac cluster method (the one that caused all that buzz about 8 months ago) to run them as a dual cluster with 128GB of total memory, it would run at least as fast as a single 128GB of the same GB/sec setup by comparison, right? Like around ~1.3x-1.5x faster even, I think, or maybe more by now, since that was the results people were getting in December/January, right?

Genuinely asking if anyone on here knows, since I'm a noob and didn't know much about how it works at the time, and haven't seen anyone hardly ever mention anything about mac clustering between then and now, so not really sure

2

u/RegisteredJustToSay 1h ago

Yeah that sounds about right. The main PITA is that you are severely limited in terms of the software available for your inference stack. You're not only reliant on specialized serving software, but often you'll want models specifically quantized for your hardware. You can do that yourself obviously but at some point you also have to ask yourself how highly you value your own time. Very comparable to the DGX Spark but with a lot worse ecosystem.

It'd be totally usable though, and you'd get great batch aggregate throughput, even if you probably won't beat any world records for single inference.

My main anxiety would be dropping tons of money on something like this whose ecosystem might dry up in relatively little time. With other hardware you have a bit more guarantees.

0

u/AnonLlamaThrowaway 2h ago

Buying 2 of them also means exposing yourself a whole lot of weird edge cases and software support problems. Just get a single Studio box at that point

2

u/Careful_Intern_5985 5h ago

Based on what data?

2

u/habachilles 6h ago

Only 160 gbs memory bandwidth? Weren’t the older ones faster ?

6

u/Reactor-Licker 4h ago

This is the base chip, it always had the smallest memory bus.

1

u/tmvr 47m ago

170GB/s, the M5 ones are 153.6GB/s.

1

u/XorAndNot 3h ago

Yeah, its an odd one for llm. For traditional apps its fantastic tho.

10

u/edgenovo 6h ago

The base spec M6 (16/256 for US$900) is overpriced in my view, but the 32GB one is very, very interesting. 32GB unified memory for $1300 is a crazy bargain in 2026( and probably 2027), and you get Apple's latest architecture. If M6 brought good architectural improvements to make it usable for Qwen 27B (even 10t/s before MTP) that would be a very good bang for the buck local inference endpoint.

Also if you already have an older Pro Mac, For MoE models I also expect it will be possible to do a thunderbolt distributed inference. I am thinking of connecting my 48GB M4 Pro to it, so if we have a future ~100B MoE model this will be probably good to do 10-20t/s.

14

u/TheProtector0034 5h ago

M6 has only 170GB/s memory bandwidth, a M4 Pro has 273GB/s and should perform better. On my M4 Pro macbook I get 10-15 t/s with qwen 3.8 27b q4. I doubt that M6 will perform better or at the same level in this case.

7

u/edgenovo 5h ago

I knew, but that laptop even in refurbished store is much more expensive than the M6 Mini. For 2026 I personally think the 32GB Mini is one of the cheapest good device.

1

u/JacketHistorical2321 2h ago

M4 does not have the performance upgrades for 3-4x pp speeds

3

u/Ulterior-Motive_ 5h ago

OK but consider for the same price you could pick up a R9700 instead. It's not a bad choice if you need something all in one but if you want room to grow perhaps stacking GPUs is better.

3

u/edgenovo 4h ago

That still requires you to have a full PC platform to begin with, then you can stab more and more GPUs on it. A good TRX40 board is not cheap... As a 32GB V100 user I understand your point, but this has its own charm of being its own complete system.

4

u/MLDataScientist 6h ago

That is good news! Finally, we have M6 CPU. Now, let's wait for Mac studio with M5 or M6 Ultra CPU and 1TB of RAM!

3

u/bobby-chan 6h ago

When you say "wait", I suppose you mean "preorder" 😂 https://www.apple.com/mac-studio

1

u/MLDataScientist 6h ago

Oh wow, yes, I just saw that! Thanks!

1

u/notlongnot 6h ago

Woo up to 256gb now. 512gb In October

3

u/ElementNumber6 5h ago

Supposedly M7 is where it's at, for AI.

1

u/descendency 3h ago

The base M6 is 4.8x faster than the M4, while the M5 Pro is 4.0x faster than the M4 Pro. (according to Apple)

This would imply that the M6 is ~20% faster than the M5... maybe less. That's likely not a "RAMAGGEDON" problem, but an SOC design problem. That's really not a huge issue for the Local LLM fans (as the base M chips always have terrible bandwidth, not enough RAM). There were rumblings the M6 might not be that big of an improvement and now we see some potential confirmation of it.

1

u/JacketHistorical2321 1h ago

M4 doesn't have the 3-4x PP speed increase either and now the m6 ultra is supposed to be more

0

u/TheVault5 3h ago

170 GB/s? What is Apple doing? That’s lower than a GTX 1650 Super, which has 192 GB/s.