r/LocalLLaMA · · 1 min read

Qwen3.8-27B is now up to ~3× faster on Apple Silicon with mlx-dspark

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

Qwen3.8-27B is now up to ~3× faster on Apple Silicon with mlx-dspark

mlx-dspark is an MLX port of DeepSeek's DSpark speculative-decoding drafters (the DeepSpec release), plus z-lab's DFlash, with one lossless verify loop. v0.10.0 adds Qwen3.8-27B via RadixArk's drafter, the first SpecForge/SGLang-packaged head it loads.

Numbers (M4 Pro 48 GB, medians of 3, greedy, output ids identical to plain decoding):

  • 8-bit target: 2.45× mean at the auto-picked cap — 3.00× math / 2.38× code / 1.96× chat, 8.3 → 20.3 tok/s (code runs hit 3.18×). Peak ~29 GB.
  • 4-bit target: 1.74× at 25.3 tok/s in ~18 GB (same drafter auto-resolves).
  • Fun property: 8-bit + drafter (20-27 tok/s) beats plain 4-bit (14.6 tok/s) — 8-bit quality at better-than-4-bit speed.

"Lossless" is checked, not asserted: the target verifies every drafted token, and the Mac app's Race view runs speculative vs plain on the same prompt and diffs the token ids (video is that view).

Everything is pip install mlx-dspark (OpenAI-compatible server + Anthropic Messages API, so it can back Claude Code with a local model), and there's a native Mac app (DMG/Homebrew).

Repo: github.com/ARahim3/mlx-dspark

I'd appreciate any feedback you might have after using it.

submitted by /u/A-Rahim
[link] [comments]

Discussion (0)

Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.

Sign in →

No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.

More from r/LocalLLaMA