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qwen3.5-9b-mlx

LM-STUDIO MLX

qwen3_5 · 9B · 4bit

Marginal

Mar 11, 2026 · Apple M4

starling-lm:7b

OLLAMA GGUF

llama · 7B · Q4_0

Good

Mar 6, 2026 · Apple M4

Global Score
59 vs 65
Hardware Fit
65 vs 96
Quality Score
57 vs 52

Hardware

qwen3.5-9b-mlx starling-lm:7b
MachineMac miniMacBook Air
CPUApple M4Apple M4
Cores1010
RAM24 GB32 GB
GPUApple M4Apple M4
OSmacOS 26.3macOS 26.3
Archarm64arm64
Power Modebalancedbalanced

Performance

qwen3.5-9b-mlx starling-lm:7b
Tokens/sec14.323.8
First chunk24 ms232 ms
TTFT13.4 s232 ms
Load time13.3 s0.4 s
Memory usage2.5 GB5.3 GB
Memory %10%17%

HW Fit Score Breakdown

qwen3.5-9b-mlx

Speed
32/50
TTFT
3/20
Memory
30/30

starling-lm:7b

Speed
46/50
TTFT
20/20
Memory
30/30

Quality

qwen3.5-9b-mlx

Reasoning
10/20
Coding
17/20
Instruction
5/20
Structured
9/15
Math
11/15
Multilingual
5/10
Reasoning: Weak Coding: Strong Instruction Following: Weak Structured Output: Adequate Math: Adequate Multilingual: Adequate

starling-lm:7b

Reasoning
10/20
Coding
13/20
Instruction
8/20
Structured
3/15
Math
9/15
Multilingual
9/10
Reasoning: Adequate Coding: Adequate Instruction Following: Weak Structured Output: Poor Math: Adequate Multilingual: Strong
View qwen3.5-9b-mlx details | View starling-lm:7b details

Run yours and compare

$ npm install -g metrillm@latest
$ metrillm

Requires Node 20+ and Ollama or LM Studio running

Or run without installing: npx metrillm@latest