Apple silicon limitations with usage on local LLM

Maximizing LLM Usage on a 128GB M1 Ultra (Apple Silicon Mac Studio) Understanding Unified Memory and the 96GB “VRAM” Limit Apple’s M1 Ultra chip uses unified memory , meaning the CPU and GPU share the same 128 GB RAM pool. However, macOS does not allow the GPU to use all 128 GB for graphics/compute tasks by default. In practice, about 75% of the physical memory is the recommended maximum for GPU…