MacBook Pro M5 Max runs AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 over Thunderbolt 5 for local LLMs

TheOriginalG2 · reddit · 2026-09-24

A developer got an AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 running LLM inference on a MacBook Pro M5 Max (128GB) via Thunderbolt 5 in a Razer Core X V2 enclosure. They ported the amdgpu driver to macOS (open-sourced as mac-amdgpu) and built LSE (LemonSeed-Engine), supporting Qwen3.6-3.8 Dense/MoE with MTP. The engine offers HIPC and Loom/HRX backends — HRX being a new AMD system for running kernels on amdgpu, with Loom the only Mac-compatible path and HIPC best on Linux. Drivers and engine are on GitHub; iPad support is the next goal.

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