phi-3.5-mini-instruct

LM-STUDIO MLX

phi3 · 4bit

Marginal

Mar 4, 2026 · Apple M4

qwen3.5-9b-mlx

LM-STUDIO MLX

qwen3_5 · 9B · 4bit

Marginal

Mar 11, 2026 · Apple M4

Global Score

55 vs 59

Hardware Fit

100 vs 65

Quality Score

36 vs 57

Hardware

phi-3.5-mini-instr… qwen3.5-9b-mlx

MachineMacBook AirMac mini

CPUApple M4Apple M4

Cores1010

RAM32 GB24 GB

GPUApple M4Apple M4

OSmacOS 26.3macOS 26.3

Archarm64arm64

Power Modebalancedbalanced

Performance

phi-3.5-mini-instr… qwen3.5-9b-mlx

Tokens/sec43.414.3

First chunk359 ms24 ms

TTFT359 ms13.4 s

Load timeN/A13.3 s

Memory usage2.0 GB2.5 GB

Memory %6%10%

HW Fit Score Breakdown

phi-3.5-mini-instruct

Speed

50/50

TTFT

20/20

Memory

30/30

qwen3.5-9b-mlx

Speed

32/50

TTFT

3/20

Memory

30/30

Quality

phi-3.5-mini-instruct

Reasoning

11/20

Coding

4/20

Instruction

7/20

Structured

1/15

Math

7/15

Multilingual

6/10

Reasoning: Adequate Coding: Poor Instruction Following: Weak Structured Output: Poor Math: Weak Multilingual: Adequate

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

View phi-3.5-mini-instr… details | View qwen3.5-9b-mlx 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