NVIDIA, AMD, Apple local AI hardware compared for inference speed

AMD’s Ryzen AI Max+ 395 chip presents a confusing market with two distinct products: third-party mini PCs like the GMKtec EVO-X2 and AMD’s official Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform. While both use the same chip and 128GB memory, the official kit costs more than double due to curated software support and "AI Playbooks." Independent testing by LTT Labs found that AMD machines generate tokens two to three times slower than Apple Silicon Mac Studios. Additionally, AMD’s ROCm software stack is significantly more mature on Linux than on Windows, where support relies on WSL.

Apple’s Mac Studio emerges as the quiet winner for inference speed, driven by high memory bandwidth. The M5 Max chip reaches 614 GB/s, while the M5 Ultra doubles that to 1.2 TB/s. This bandwidth advantage allows the Mac Studio to outperform both NVIDIA and AMD in local inference benchmarks. With up to 512GB of unified memory on the Ultra model, Apple can run 70B models without quantization, a capability the other two machines lack. The tradeoff is ecosystem lock-in, as code must run through Apple’s stack rather than CUDA or ROCm, though tools like Ollama and LM Studio work out of the box.