Notes

First-hand measurements run on hardware I own, published with the scripts and the raw dataset so the numbers can be recomputed rather than trusted.

5 posts

Notes2026-08-27

The Benchmark Number Is a Burst — I Ran a Fanless M1 Flat Out for 30 Minutes

746 back-to-back generations across two 30-minute runs on a passively cooled MacBook Air. Both settle on the same sustained rate — 51.7 and 50.9 tok/s — while approaching it from opposite directions, and macOS reports no thermal pressure in either.

Analysis Brief →

Notes2026-08-27

I Tried to Measure What One LLM Query Costs in Energy. The Instrument Lied Twice.

A failed measurement, published in full. The Mac battery gauge refreshes once a minute against generations lasting 2.8 seconds, and where a long enough window exists to beat that, its integral disagrees with the pack's own charge counter by 2.05x. Per-query energy is not measurable on this hardware without root.

Analysis Brief →

Notes2026-08-26

A 2.5× Bigger Model Costs Only 1.55× the Speed — I Measured Why on an 8GB M1

Fifteen benchmark runs across three local models on one MacBook Air, with the quantization variable held still. The result isn't the tokens-per-second table — it's what the table reveals about which physical resource local inference is actually spending.

Analysis Brief →

Notes2026-08-16

The Real Ceiling for Local LLMs on an 8GB Mac Isn't RAM — It's Disk

A follow-up benchmark on the same 8GB Apple M1: a genuine Llama 3.2 3B measurement, then a real, unplanned finding — macOS's own swap file, not GPU memory, is what actually stopped this machine from testing a 7-8B model.

Analysis Brief →

Notes2026-07-27

How to Run a Local LLM: Hardware, Cost, and Tokens-Per-Second Benchmarks

Real tokens-per-second numbers measured on an actual 8GB Apple M1 via Ollama, plus cited community benchmarks showing what changes once you move to a bigger model or a dedicated GPU.

Analysis Brief →