What is Splash Engine? #
Splash is an open-source inference engine from Inco AI for running language models locally on Apple silicon. It is optimized specifically for Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Qwen3.8-27B. The engine provides GPU kernels and a memory plan tailored to each supported model. Each model ships with a dedicated DFlash 2 draft model for speculative decoding, which improves generation speed.
In Inco's tests on a 48 GB M5 Pro, Splash delivered roughly twice the decode speed of the next-fastest engine they measured on Qwen3.8-27B: 74 tokens per second on short prompts and 54 at 32K context. With four concurrent requests on short prompts, its combined throughput reached 170 tokens per second—3.9× the next-fastest engine in their comparison. Read more about Splash in Inco's blog post.
Use it in LM Studio Bionic #
Download and install LM Studio Bionic 1.1.5 or newer, then open the app. Splash requires an M3-or-newer Mac running macOS 26.4 or later with at least 36 GB of unified memory; Inco recommends 48 GB or more.
Navigate to Settings > Runtime. Under Experimental backends, click Download next to Splash (Metal) to install the engine.
Download the Splash engine from Settings > Runtime.
Then go to Settings > Explore, paste one of the following Hugging Face links into the search bar, select the model, and click Download:
Once the download finishes, start a new session and select the model from the local model picker.