spicyneuron/Kimi-K2.6-MLX-3.3bit
0406
Kimi K2.6 optimized to run comfortably on a Mac Studio M3 512. This is the smaller, compact version. Quality-first version here.
- A mixed-precision quant that balances speed, memory, and accuracy.
- 3-bit baseline with important layers at 8-bit and BF16.
- Fits into ~430 GB memory, leaving plenty of room to run a smaller, faster utility model (ex: Qwen 3.6 35B, Gemma 4 26B).
- This quant does not support image input.
Usage
# Start server at http://localhost:8080/v1/chat/completions
# Kimi K2.6 requires tiktoken + remote code for the tokenizer
uvx --from mlx-lm --with tiktoken \
mlx_lm.server \
--host 127.0.0.1 \
--port 8080 \
--trust-remote-code \
--model spicyneuron/Kimi-K2.6-MLX-3.3bitBenchmarks
Tested on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with:
mlx_lm.kld --baseline-model path/to/mlx-full-precision
mlx_lm.perplexity --sequence-length 512 --seed 123
mlx_lm.benchmark --prompt-tokens 1024 --generation-tokens 512 --num-trials 5
mlx_lm.evaluate --tasks hellaswag --seed 123 --num-shots 0 --limit 500
mlx_lm.evaluate --tasks piqa --seed 123 --num-shots 0 --limit 500
mlx_lm.evaluate --tasks winogrande --seed 123 --num-shots 0 --limit 500Note:
mlx_lm.kldis approximate, based ontop_knot full logits. Here's the code.- Kimi K2.6 KL divergence calculated against the largest quant I could run locally (~490 GB), so real KL is higher.
Methodology
Quantized with a mlx-lm fork, drawing inspiration from Unsloth/AesSedai/ubergarm style mixed-precision GGUFs. MLX quantization options differ from llama.cpp, but the principles are the same:
- Sensitive layers like MoE routing, attention, and output embeddings get higher precision
- More tolerant layers like MoE experts get lower precision
