Bro naked123, can explain what you meant by 55 tokens per second to noob like moi. I tot tokens is consumed by AI when it processes the user's input. Did you mean that the setup you listed can process up to 55 tokens of processing per second?
There are two important performance metrics when running LLMs locally:
TTFT (Time to First Token) and
decode speed.
TTFT measures how long it takes before the model produces its first output token. A major part of this is
prefill, where the model processes your input prompt.
Decode speed measures how quickly the model generates subsequent tokens, typically in tokens per second (tokens/s).
Both matter, but their importance depends on your workload. Long prompts require fast prefill, while long responses benefit from fast decoding.
Apple Silicon Macs generally have slower prefill and decoding performance than high-end NVIDIA GPUs when running the same model entirely in GPU memory.
However, Macs have an advantage in unified memory capacity, allowing them to run larger models that might not fit into a single consumer NVIDIA GPU. MOE model will be the best for this hardware.
For serious local LLM use, particularly coding agents and workloads where speed matters, I'd generally recommend an NVIDIA GPU such as the RTX 3090, 4090, or 5090.
The RTX 5080 is also capable, but its 16GB VRAM can be restrictive compared to the 24GB available on the 3090 and 4090.