67B MiniMax H3-Image runs on a 16GB MacBook Air via MLX with ~85% less peak memory
FlimsyBrief4232 · reddit · 2026-11-13
A developer ported MiniMax's new 67B H3-Image model to Apple Silicon with MLX, and it runs on a 16GB M5 MacBook Air: 1024×1024 in as little as 34.8s with 2.5GB peak process memory, using the original 6-step model with no extra quantization.
The trick combines staged inference, on-demand DiT weight streaming, async evaluation, weight prefetching, and W8A8 Metal acceleration. On an M5 Pro (48GB) at 1024×1024: resident 23.63s/21.18GB, streaming 32.33s/2.53GB, streaming+prefetch+async 23.61s/3.23GB — 85% less peak memory with virtually no speed penalty, and all modes produce pixel-identical images.
The implementation is open source (Python API, CLI, auto model downloads, reproducible benchmarks) and supports native 4K generation and multi-reference image editing.
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