I switched my local LLM setup to Ollama's new MLX engine, and my Mac suddenly feels twice as fast
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Ollama's new MLX engine delivers significant performance gains for local LLM inference on Apple Silicon Macs. The update leverages Apple's unified memory architecture more effectively, combines GPU operations into larger Metal kernels via MLX's JIT compiler, and improves GPU-backed token sampling — resulting in roughly 20% higher output speed over the previous Q4_K_M implementation. Quality also improves through support for NVIDIA's NVFP4 quantization format, which cuts quality loss by about half compared to Q4_K_M at similar memory usage. A redesigned snapshot-based caching system replaces traditional prefix caching for agent workflows, allowing coding assistants like Claude Code and Aider to resume from saved model states rather than rebuilding context on every tool call — meaningfully reducing latency in multi-agent setups.
