Perplexity's Lily beats MLX-LM with 1.23x prefill and 1.35x decode throughput on M5 Max
perplexity_ai · x · 2026-09-03
Perplexity published benchmarks of Lily running Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on an M5 Max MacBook Pro:
- Across ten prompt lengths and ten decode contexts, Lily was consistently faster than MLX-LM
- On average 1.23x higher prefill throughput and 1.35x higher decode throughput
- Output quality effectively unchanged
Key idea: prefill and decode are fundamentally different workloads — prefill processes many prompt tokens at once with weight reuse, while decode generates one token at a time, making memory traffic and bandwidth the bottleneck.
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