r/LocalLLaMA · · 1 min read

PSA for M5Ultra owners running LLMs: set your prefill step to 8192

Mirrored from r/LocalLLaMA for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.

Prefill step size affects both PP performance and your drafter fetching logits for MTP (affects dflash as well, mlx-vlm needs to be patched slightly to support chunked prefill for dflash).
It also needs to be reasonably large to be able to fill all your cores but not overfill - otherwise it will require more dispatches.
In my tests I observe large gains up to 8k, e.g.:

GLM-flash-4bit with MTP --prefill-step-size 8192 on raw mlx-vlm:
Trial 1 (32768 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=1056.033, generation_tps=72.722, total_time=38.082
Trial 2 (65536 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=919.958, generation_tps=73.671, total_time=78.203
Trial 3 (131072 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=735.545, generation_tps=71.067, total_time=185.435

GLM-flash-4bit with MTP --prefill-step-size 2048:
Trial 1 (32768 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=860.489, generation_tps=50.011, total_time=48.339
Trial 2 (65536 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=785.604, generation_tps=51.245, total_time=93.425
Trial 3 (131072 prompt tokens): prompt_tps=623.588, generation_tps=50.843, total_time=220.288

omlx with MTP (total time is skewed as it's 128TG vs 512 above):
pp32768/tg128 44136.5 17.19 742.4 tok/s 58.6 tok/s 46.353s 709.7 tok/s 176.66 GB
pp65536/tg128 86749.1 21.21 755.5 tok/s 47.5 tok/s 89.504s 733.6 tok/s 177.15 GB
pp131072/tg128 178622.6 19.01 733.8 tok/s 53.0 tok/s 181.156s 724.2 tok/s 178.45 GB

note that some engines (like omlx) support adaptive step size, e.g. the prefill speeds I observed for qwen3.8-flash-next on omlx even though it's starting from 2048 matches 8k performance from raw mlx-vlm at 64k context and above and even works 10% better on smaller context, but as you can see it's not always the case.

submitted by /u/bakawolf123
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