MacBook Pro M5 Max LSE LLM running an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 over Thunderbolt 5 in a Razer enclosure

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA News

Summary

This article demonstrates a setup where an AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 GPU is used on a MacBook Pro via Thunderbolt 5 with a custom driver and LemonSeed-Engine for running LLMs like Qwen3.6-3.8.

Hello Everyone! Good news for anyone who can compile code on apple, you can now experience using a AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 on a MacBook Pro or Mac mini, Mac Studio or any OSX variant as long as it has Thunderbolt, next up is a iPad with a M series processor! The driver seems to be working pretty sound now, and I am continuing to optimize my engine LSE or LemonSeed-Engine. It supports Qwen3.6 - 3.8 Dense and/or MoE with MTP, it works on Mac only through amdgpu driver I ported to mac from Linux and the engine works on linux. The HIPC backend works best on linux and the Loom / HRX backend works best on Mac, only the LOOM / HRX Combo can run on Mac. Both HIPC and Loom use HRX its a new AMD system that allows us to run hipc and/or loom kernels on a amdgpu. I hope you like my setup, if you are anything like me you will think this is super cool and if your not you will hate it, haha! P.S. You may or may not find this in lemonade later. MacBook Pro M5 Max - 128GB AMD Radeon AI Pro R9700 Razer Core X V2 https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/mac-amdgpu - Driver https://github.com/Geramy/LSE - LLM Engine https://github.com/lemonade-sdk/lemonade - Lemonade SDK Org
Original Article

Similar Articles

I have just moved from MacBook M5 pro 48 GB to RTX3090

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA

A software developer shares their experience switching from a MacBook to an RTX3090 Linux setup for running AI models, achieving significantly higher inference speeds with Qwen 3.8 27B and potentially replacing their Claude subscription.

Qwen3.8-27B at 144 tok/s on an M5 Max MacBook Pro

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA

Inco Splash is an open-source inference engine optimized for Apple silicon, offering significant speed improvements for running AI models like Qwen3.8-27B on M-series MacBooks.