Run Splash on M1 & M2 Macs

Splash is making waves in LLM inference on Apple silicon:

"It delivers 2× the decode speed of the next-fastest engine we measured on Qwen3.8-27B and stays ahead at every context length we tested, to 32K tokens. At four parallel subagents, the speedup increases to almost 4×."

The official release requires M3 or newer, but Erik Paperniuk has backported Splash for M1 and M2 Macs:

• You can now run Qwen3.8-27B on a 2021 M1 Max at 39 tok/s: I ported Splash (M3+ only) and wrote custom Metal kernels

• Splash on M1, part 2: 35B-A3B at 144 tok/s on a 2021 M1 Max, plus a head-to-head with oMLX and MTPLX (speed, temperature, power, memory)

Steps

1. Install: curl -fsSL https://github.com/paperniuk/splash/releases/download/1.0.2-m1/install-m1.sh | sh

2. Serve: splash-m1 serve --model incoai/Qwen3.8-27B-Splash (First run downloads the 17.4GB model package and prepares it for the GPU; later starts are much faster.)

3. Chat at http://127.0.0.1:8000. To disable the chat page, add --no-webui to the command in step 2. More settings.

4. Set http://127.0.0.1:8000 as the OpenAI-compatible API base URL in apps like Goose. No key is needed unless you set one. Several coding agents are supported too, e.g., splash-m1 opencode.

❧ 2026-09-26