Qwen3 235B-A22B on Mac Studio M5 Ultra 96 GB

1. Decode: reading 22.0B active parameters at 4.50 bits/weight takes 11.77 ms at 1200 GB/s x 88% achieved efficiency.
2. MoE routing penalty of 15% applied: expert gathers are less bandwidth-efficient than a dense sweep.
3. Prefill: 192 TFLOPS (FP16) x 1.69 calibrated against measured prefill on this platform x 22% assumed model-FLOPs utilisation, divided by 2 x 71.9B parameters per token.
4. Prefill uses 71.9B effective parameters, not the 22B active in decode: a batch of hundreds of tokens routes across most of the expert pool.

• MoE decode depends on how well the engine batches expert gathers; real results vary more than for dense models.
• Prefill throughput is highly engine-dependent. Flash attention, batch size and quantized KV all move this number substantially, and for sparse mixture-of-experts models it is the least reliable figure we produce.
• This is a calculated estimate, not a measurement. It assumes a single request, a short prompt, no speculative decoding and a warm model already resident in memory.

Estimator version estimator_v1. Stored with every estimated row so old estimates can be regenerated when the model improves.