Local AI Advisor

Qwen3.5-9B on local hardware

Estimated comfort for repository coding with Aider on a MacBook Pro M4 Pro 48GB.

Qwen3.5-9BOpen source

Qwen · apache-2.0 · 7,483,178 downloads

Hugging Face
VisionReasoning / thinking mode
Parameters
9.7B exact
Context window
256K tokens
Attention
Hybrid linear + full attention
Layers · KV heads · head dim
32 · 4 · 256
KV cache
32 KB/token · 1.0 GB at 32K
Tool calling
good (from chat template)
Thinking
good (from chat template)
Vision
good (from config)
Commercial use
allowedRetain the required license and attribution notices
Import confidence
medium · capabilities estimated

Weights by quantization

Q3_K_M

4.4 GB

gguf file size

Q4_K_M

5.3 GB

gguf file size

Q5_K_M

6.1 GB

gguf file size

Q6_K

6.9 GB

gguf file size

Q8_0

8.9 GB

gguf file size

F16 / BF16

17 GB

gguf file size

  • • vision: good, inferred from config (low confidence).
  • • Capability ratings are estimated from model size and name — this model hasn't been assessed by hand.
  • • GGUF sizes come from community conversions matched by model name; equivalence and runtime support are not verified. MLX conversion availability is unverified.

Qwen3.5-9B — 6-bit

Acceptable for your workload

Acceptable

Speed

20–25 tok/s

Adequate

Memory left

27 GB

of 48 GB

First word in

≈45 s

Adequate

All the details
Your setup
MacBook Pro M4 Pro 48 GB
Workload
Repository coding with Aider
Runtime → tool
LM Studio → Aider
Memory used
9.6 GB
Context
32K · up to 128K practical
Tool support
Official
Use-case fit
Poorly suited

Why?

  • Model fits with approximately 27 GB of memory headroom.
  • LM Studio supports hardware acceleration on this machine (Metal (Apple GPU)).
  • Aider can connect to LM Studio (officially supported).
  • Generation (20–25 tok/s) is adequate but not ideal for interactive coding.
  • Ingesting a prompt of 14K tokens takes ≈45 s, and each step ≈55 s — noticeable waits.
  • 32K window; generation drops to 19–25 tok/s when it is full.
  • Weak coding capability for interactive coding.

Why “Acceptable” rather than “Comfortable”?

  • Workload suitability: Weak coding capability for interactive coding.
  • Prompt processing: Ingesting the first prompt (14K tokens) takes ≈45 s; each of the ~4 follow-up turns takes ≈55 s (≈5 min per task).
  • Generation: Expected 20–25 tok/s at ~16K tokens of context. Coding with repository context is comfortable from about 28 tok/s.
  • Context: 32K window; generation drops to 19–25 tok/s when it is full.

How sure are we?

Medium confidence

Estimated from bandwidth and compute, calibrated against 2 verified benchmarks of other models on this same chip (measured with a different engine, so calibration is partial).

  • Calibrated with verified benchmarks of other models on this chip.
  • Hybrid/sliding attention performance varies more between runtimes.
Medium confidence
Check with your hardware and workload