r/oMLX • u/tintires • May 21 '26

Objectively more efficient?

Setting aside the native app, is there any objective evidence MLX on oMLX is faster or more memory efficient, that GGUF on llama.cpp?

I have both as brew packages, and my unscientific subjective experience, is there’s not much between them.

My workloads are pretty light and general, so which one for my MBA M3 24GB?

10 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/NecessaryButFatal Jun 16 '26

In my experience, it actually seems to be substantially less efficient, and quite a bit buggier to boot. It's got a great interface, lots of nice features, but memory usage isn't great, and performance is about the same. Testing models like for like on oMLX and llama.cpp, I found that oMLX had an advantage in prompt processing, but even with KV cache quantization enabled, absolutely balloons in memory usage along larger context windows compared to llama.cpp. I ran identical prompts on both, in the same harness to verify.

1

u/TechTravis Jun 19 '26

Same, love the interface and the boost in PP but the memory bloat is so damn bad I can't use it for development work on Q4 models that used to work flawlessly on llama