Gemma 4 26B GGUF Outperforms MLX on Apple Silicon: 56.1 vs 52.7 tok/s, 4.7x Perplexity Advantage for K-Quant

The Agent Times·medium signal

Developer benchmarks on M3 Max show Google's Gemma 4 26B MoE runs faster under GGUF (llama.cpp) than Apple's MLX framework: 56.1 tok/s vs 52.7 on creative writing, 41.7 vs 38.4 on 8-turn agent conversations. localbench.substack analysis of 80 GGUF quantizations found K-quant delivers 4.7x better perplexity than uniform 4-bit (MLX's current approach). For developers running local agents on Apple Silicon, format choice directly determines inference speed, memory efficiency, and multi-turn stability for agentic workloads.