Can Mac Studio M1 Ultra 128 GB run Gemma 4 26B-A4B?
128 GB unified · 800 GB/s memory bandwidth · Gemma 4 26B-A4B has 25.8B parameters (3.8B active per token).
Short answer
Yes, excellent for chat and comfortable or better for every workload we test.
Best quantization for chat: 6-bit (20 GB of weights) on LM Studio. Generation: 85–110 tok/s, leaving about 97 GB free for your other apps.
How it rates for each workload
Same model and machine, different jobs. Agents and long documents send far bigger prompts than chat, so they need much more speed and memory.
| Workload | Verdict | Quant | Generation | First reply | Context | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chatwith Open WebUI | Excellent | 6-bit | 85–110 tok/s | under 1 s | 8K | Details |
| Coding questionswith Continue | Excellent | 6-bit | 85–110 tok/s | ≈3 s | 16K | Details |
| Coding in a repositorywith Aider | Comfortable | 6-bit | 80–110 tok/s | ≈8 s | 32K | Details |
| Agentic codingwith OpenCode | Comfortable | 6-bit | 75–100 tok/s | ≈10 s | 32K | Details |
| Long documents (64K)with Open WebUI | Excellent | 6-bit | 65–85 tok/s | ≈35 s | 64K | Details |
Speeds are estimates calibrated against measured benchmarks on similar hardware. “First reply” is the time to read the workload’s opening prompt. How we calculate
Get it running
Copy-paste commands for the 6-bit build with a 64K context. Ollama and llama.cpp download the file straight from Hugging Face.
ollama run hf.co/unsloth/gemma-4-26B-A4B-it-GGUF:UD-Q6_K_XL
Downloads 23.3 GB (UD-Q6_K_XL). Ollama's default context is small: set OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=65536 before `ollama serve` for long prompts.
Other models for Mac Studio M1 Ultra 128 GB
The best-rated models for chat on this machine.
- gpt-oss-120b95–130 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.6 35B-A3B110–140 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B Instruct110–140 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 35B-A3B110–140 tok/sExcellent
- LFM2.5 24B-A2B210–290 tok/sExcellent
- Qwen3.5 122B-A10B40–50 tok/sExcellent
Cheapest machines for Gemma 4 26B-A4B
Hardware rated comfortable or better for chat, lowest price first.
- Mac mini M4 24 GB$999 · 25–35 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M6 24 GB$1,299 · 30–50 tok/sComfortable
- Laptop · Core Ultra 7 258V (Arc 140V) · 32 GB$1,300 · 15–25 tok/sExcellent
- Laptop · Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (Radeon 890M) · 32 GB$1,300 · 16–25 tok/sComfortable
- Mac mini M4 32 GB$1,399 · 25–35 tok/sExcellent
- MacBook Air M4 24 GB$1,399 · 25–35 tok/sComfortable
Same chip, other memory: 64 GB
Different tool, context size or workload?
These pages use typical settings. The full check models your exact setup.