Since it might be helpful to some, here's my current commandline for llama.cpp running on an RTX 4090 with my monitor moved to the iGPU to free up all of its VRAM.
Identical to the qwen3.6 config. With a prompt like "svg owl" (which can reuse quite a lot compared with creative writing or similar, so ngram-mod shines), I get about 70-80t/s like this, with a memory overclock of about 1.5GHz
Thanks for posting! Have you had any success with running without kv cache quantization? Is there a noticeable difference in quality without any? I would assume that would eat into context but 170k is pretty generous!
According to this shitty vibecoded thing "I" built https://hypfer.github.io/will-it-fit-llama-cpp/, FP16 K/V would give me something like 90k context at the same model quant, which doesn't really fit my usage.
But maybe someone else has experience to share there
I hope really badly that we'll get a new 35B A3B or similar MoE model!
I also miss the Qwen 3 Coder Next, which was 80B A3B, there are quite a few use cases where a non-dense model <100B would be the sweet spot (when you have the VRAM but not the TDP or compute power). Heck, I'd gladly take A5B or A8B or even A10B as a sort of middle ground.
Me too. 35B A3B runs really fast on my MacBook Pro (M4 Max) and is suitable for real-time tasks like dictation post-processing. The dense model is not.
I'm hoping too that they'll put out some MoE variants.
Qwen3.5:122b:a10b can run about twice as fast as this 27b dense model.
Edit: Like its predecessors, 3.8 seems really inclined to overthinking, and on a 27b dense model that's kind of painful.
I think I'm going to stick with gemma4:26b-a3b as my go-to because it runs about 4x as fast and tends to only need a fraction of the tokens in its 'thinking' stage to get the same or similar answer.
Same here! Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is the only local model I've found that runs reasonably on my iGPU. Looks like me and and my noisily-wheezing laptop will be sitting out this upgrade.
Total param count decides how much vram you need to run it. Active param count decides how fast it runs. My 10 year old GPU can load quantized 35B or 27B, but it can’t process 27B parameters per token faster than 2-4tok/s, while it can do A3B at >40tok/s
I'm a huge open model fan, and have used them since forever, even have daily drivers for on-prem dev, but no. They do not beat opus on real-world usage.
Qwen models are impressively good for what they are, are "good enough" for plenty tasks, can be ran locally on decently priced hardware, and so on. They certainly have their uses, and the field in general has advanced faster than my early expectations. But to compare a 27B model to SotA behemoths from a few months ago is doing everyone a disservice, especially people who pick it up, try to use them just like API models, and leave disappointed and confused. Number goes up on a benchmark isn't it.
We have an internal eval that measures performance on tasks for a handful of embedded systems repos for our mmWave radios (mostly Rust, some C for microcontroller stuff). Qwen3.6-27B scores only 4% lower for pass@1, n=250 compared to Opus-4.8.
For the labeled dataset, the average PR size they're being measured against is around 1.5k SLOC.
This is very much "real-world usage" for us. The sort of change sets that come in daily/weekly and are solving non-trivial issues in the respective codebases.
As is usually the case, the most broad claims from both the labs and from the consequent pushback are talking past each other.
4% is within the margin of error anyways for pass@1, so I think pass@k > 1 is gonna be the better indicator of any movement (still need to calibrate the optimal k to re-test). 10 seems too tolerant even though that tends to be the next tranche I reach for.
> ...but no. They do not beat opus on real-world usage.
I agree, but then we just need meaningful benchmarks that clearly show that! Otherwise it's hand waving about something that should be put on paper in quantifiable terms.
If you are working in a company and using language models, it is a very good idea to hold a bunch of evals you can trust and use to validate new models. Calibrate every once in a while with prod data. We have our own and the only numbers on quality and cost I trust come from this setup.
> but then we just need meaningful benchmarks that clearly show that!
That's the rub. AI benchmarks are IMO, by and large totally unreliable. We think of them as similar to traditional benchmarks of deterministic processes where the number of variables is low. But they're anything but that. Non-deterministic processes with an astounding number of variables and fuzzy acceptance criteria.
It leads to results like these, where if you take it at face value, the only conclusion you can draw is "wow Anthropic must be stupid if Opus takes 1T parameters to do what Qwen can do in 27B."
"Benchmark is stupid" and "model beats model on benchmark" are two different things, though. The second one is objectively true regardless of your views on the first one, right? To expect everyone to share your opinion that benchmarks are stupid is pretty weird, and just saying "no" to an objective truth is the definition of delusion.
KL divergence is nothing close to a replacement for benchmarks. As flawed as benchmarks are, KL divergence is a barely useful signal. The fact that Unsloth only just started publishing KL divergences shows how unserious the quantization space is.
People will claim it's not comparable to Opus despite it beating the score. I'm not sure I disagree, but I'm also unsure whether I care. Most new models nowadays are "good enough". I cannot complain because I'd rather spend that time improving my prompts and docs. Opus might be a _slight bit better_ at picking up vague hints, but it's also extremely expensive, and I hit the 5 hour limit way too quick.
I care a lot about speed and efficiency right now. For my setup I would like to have 2-3 different model families. I've settled on GLM-5.3 (formerly Deepseek v4 pro 0813) for architecting, Deepseek V4 Pro 0813 for developing, and Gemini flash lite (any recent cheap model) for repo scouting. I'll add another one in the mix for reviewing (in this case Gemini 3.7) and that's all I need.
I've tried most models except Grok.
Qwen is too expensive IMO (Alibaba Cloud subscriptions are hard to come by and I'm not spending 50 euros a month for a tool, so 18 euros it is). If it ever becomes efficient enough to run locally I will definitely look back.
Claude is slow and expensive (the cache hit prices are absurd).
OAI is pretty good, I might add it to my arsenal seeing how cheap it is.
These opinions change every day. Last week I would've never picked Deepseek until I read about the pricing. even post aug 16 it's worth it (although it's getting close to gemini pricing).
Right now my costs are 12 euros a month (z.ai) + whatever deepseek consumes. This typically isn't more than 8 euros a week. 44 euros a month and I have a setup that is doing pretty well.
I'm convinced a lot of the anti-open-weight model comments at this point are inorganic traffic - there's trillions in investor money riding on a world where these models aren't cheap commodities. Having actually used things like the recent GLM, Kimi, and Qwen I think any edge the labs have is marginal at most and actually prefer the open weight models in most day to day usage.
Anthropic's recent releases are wordy to the point of exhaustion. Every time I use opus recently I find myself wanting to yell "GET TO THE POINT" at a terminal, which is exacerbated by it being slow.
Honest question, how do you assess models this quickly? What metrics are you using? Would love to get my suite from multiple days and hundreds of prompts down to minutes. Got a few first pass tasks I run upon release for an initial experience, but those only work because even Fable and Sol fail despite objectively correct solutions existing, so it works because most models fail, but then, those are consciously not enough for coding, tool use, adherence or task specific inference and assessment…
One thing a lot of people don't seem to factor when hyping Qwen is how much models like this tend to 'overthink' with seemingly endless 'second guessing'. 3.8 seems no different from what I've tried thus far.
As capable as it is, it's hard to justify using it when a competing model (e.g. Gemma4:26b-a3b) can consistently achieve the same or similar response with only 1/10th as many 'thinking' tokens, achieve much higher tokens/second, and take a small fraction of the time. I suppose 'YMMV' depending on your use case.
Also, I haven't used it enough yet to see if it's prone to infinite looping, but its predecessors sure were.
Use 3.6 27b as a daily driver for months with charmbracelet crush. Gemma 26b-A3b is not even remotely comparable in terms of coding for me. YMMV depending on how you work, what harness you use, etc I suppose.
Any tips on the best approach at running this at an M4 Max 128GB? Token throughput was a bit slow with the last 27B one (MLX), ended up using the A3B variant but if I could get this one to reasonable speed I'd much prefer it.
27B is a dense model so it will be slower with an MoE (A3B), but should have better quality? I still haven’t found very good uses cases on my M3 Max for dense models. Even if you can find a MTP version, it doesn’t help much, especially if you compare against an MoE with MTP as well.
Go for a slightly more quantised version, and experiment with different MTP settings. I find that MLX versions are marginally faster on my 64GB M1 Max, but I usually use Unsloth's GGUFs via llama.cpp as there's a much greater range of quants available and I prefer llama.cpp. MTP sometimes also helps a little, but I suspect it's less helpful on my system than others.
This is the way if you need speed. It costs a little bit in smarts, but compare the MTPLX option listed above with the oQ4e-mtp quant using oMLX. The good cacheing layer in oMLX will help things feel faster for some classes of tasks in my experience.
Wait for the MTP variants that will likely be out within days. I'm on a 128GB Strix Halo box and for 3.6-27B 8bits I was getting about 9tok/sec (not great). With MTP that gets closer to 18 tok/sec (kind'a usable).
Unfortunately, that chip just doesn't really have the memory bandwidth to run this (or nearly any) model at acceptable speeds. I have the exact same chip (M4 Max 128GB) and I've been trying to optimize a completely purpose-built implementation with Fable and this is just not possible. Even if you could reach the full 576GB/s, it's just physically impossible to exceed these numbers with the model's architecture:
2 bpw - ~85.7t/s
3 bpw - ~58.0t/s
4 bpw - ~43.9t/s
6 bpw - ~29.5t/s
8 bpw - ~22.2t/s
16 bpw - ~11.2t/s
without cheating. You'd have to exclude layers, skip operations, etc. basically do stuff the model wasn't trained for. And speed collapses so fast with context that even 2 bpw would be looking at ~37.6t/s after just 128K tokens.
MTP only improves the situation by up to 2x in the ideal case, while drastically reducing the performance floor. While optimizing a 9B model on this hardware, I've found that the GPU just doesn't have enough FLOPS to handle speculating more than one or two tokens ahead on a single stream, regardless of quant level, simply because of the arithmetic cost of the forward pass. The 27B model would be even more expensive than that, potentially such that it's already bottlenecked by the GPU itself rather than memory.
I wouldn't get my hopes up for the 35B-A3B either. Not only is it reportedly much less intelligent, but I hit the exact same 85t/s wall in practice (again with highly specialized inference).
Without speculation I can reach around 120t/s on Qwen3.5-9B and with n-gram speculation (not even MTP; this derivative didn't come with one) around about 150t/s on average. This is on the very very edge of what I'd consider acceptable for me to even consider using such a compact model. YMMV due to the silicon lottery but the situation isn't good.
I hope the bonsai team makes another 1bit quant of this model (or releases code/instructions on how to do it), using the Qwen3.6 27B on my 16GB mac mini has been wild . The 1bit quant feels like opus level… for the first couple turns. Then it has trouble eg switching from plan mode to act mode. This is mostly mitigated by starting a new session. (tbf this limitation is called out on the hf page)
I saw unsloth has 1bit quants too so I might check that out, anybody have experience with those?
100k is all the context I have ram for, this is with any auto-compact turned off. This is using Cline in vs code. I’m sure I could tune the system prompt and mode switching more to work better with this specific model, but I haven’t gone down the custom harness rabbit hole yet.
And this is also specifically for the 1bit quant version. I don’t think the fp8 or even fp4 versions have this issue, but I haven’t tried those much
If the benchmarks are a real indication, we now have a local model that is runnable on a high-end personal PC that trades blows with the leading model Claude Opus 4.6 Max from half a year ago.
I found this kind of amusing while running it (using Pi as the harness). Don't know if this is evidence of intense fine tuning from Claude but it smells like it...
" The user wants me to explore the repository at XXXX and report back. Let me start by understanding the project structure, reading the
CLAUDE.md file, and getting a general overview of what this repository is.
Let me start by reading the main project documentation and exploring the directory structure.
I'll take a look around this repo. Let me start by getting a lay of the land.
read resource CLAUDE.md (ctrl+o to expand)
ENOENT: no such file or directory, access 'XXXX/CLAUDE.md'"
can you tell me ideas of usecases of 9 or 10B language models ? I cant find any usecases other than training a lora on them to give good bash commands for example
Architecture thread! Afaict they continue to use gated attention + delta net, which was also adopted+adapted by K3, but im surprised theres no improvements to the residual stream (deepseek are using manifold hyper-connections, kimi have attention residuals) ?
I use the Qwens as a vision model for my DeepSeek V4 Flashes to handle. But the Qwens run on old RTX A6000 Ampere. Does anyone know if there's any news about INT4/AWQ quants for the RTX A6000?
Model benchmarks are useful, to a point, but it is the long tail of things you do with the model that determines if it's good at a wide range of activities. Ant/OAI, to their credit, build their models -- even the small ones -- so they follow instructions and do tool calling well, without the system prompts confusing them. This is especially important for long-horizon tool calling.
So one open weight model might "meet" Opus or whatever on benchmarks, but then fail to follow a simple answer format and also tool call correctly. The models are whipped to within an inch of their lives to strictly adhere to their post training quality gates.
Why don't qwen/alibaba host the model themselves? I was looking forward to trying it on their coding plan. Google are the same way with their Gemma models.
Can anyone who has that specific personal test he tries on different models , and tries this model , to tell us here if possible , how good or bad is this new model ? compared to others ?
There is a down to earth guy on YT that performs a series of tests against LLMs running on non-god-tier commodity hardware. He will likely be testing this soon enough.
strong visual reasoning apparently, which is nice. still lacking native audio however. hoping for more companies to embrace the spirit of something like `gemma-4-12b-qat` for actual multi-modality (text, image, video, audio).
llama-server -m Qwen3.8-27B-IQ4_NL.gguf --mmproj mmproj-BF16.gguf -c 170000 --parallel 1 -ngl -1 --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 -b 1024 -ub 512 --flash-attn on --no-context-shift --no-mmproj-offload --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-n-max 5 --spec-default --cache-type-k-draft q4_0 --cache-type-v-draft q4_0 --threads 24 --jinja --reasoning on -fit off
Identical to the qwen3.6 config. With a prompt like "svg owl" (which can reuse quite a lot compared with creative writing or similar, so ngram-mod shines), I get about 70-80t/s like this, with a memory overclock of about 1.5GHz
But maybe someone else has experience to share there
I also miss the Qwen 3 Coder Next, which was 80B A3B, there are quite a few use cases where a non-dense model <100B would be the sweet spot (when you have the VRAM but not the TDP or compute power). Heck, I'd gladly take A5B or A8B or even A10B as a sort of middle ground.
Also alternate link for viewing the images without signing in: https://xcancel.com/Alibaba_Qwen/status/2088280182356611304
Qwen3.5:122b:a10b can run about twice as fast as this 27b dense model.
Edit: Like its predecessors, 3.8 seems really inclined to overthinking, and on a 27b dense model that's kind of painful. I think I'm going to stick with gemma4:26b-a3b as my go-to because it runs about 4x as fast and tends to only need a fraction of the tokens in its 'thinking' stage to get the same or similar answer.
Whats up with focusing on the active param count? Do yall fiddle with the weights or something?
Unsloth's GGUF quants are up: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
I'm a huge open model fan, and have used them since forever, even have daily drivers for on-prem dev, but no. They do not beat opus on real-world usage.
Qwen models are impressively good for what they are, are "good enough" for plenty tasks, can be ran locally on decently priced hardware, and so on. They certainly have their uses, and the field in general has advanced faster than my early expectations. But to compare a 27B model to SotA behemoths from a few months ago is doing everyone a disservice, especially people who pick it up, try to use them just like API models, and leave disappointed and confused. Number goes up on a benchmark isn't it.
We have an internal eval that measures performance on tasks for a handful of embedded systems repos for our mmWave radios (mostly Rust, some C for microcontroller stuff). Qwen3.6-27B scores only 4% lower for pass@1, n=250 compared to Opus-4.8.
For the labeled dataset, the average PR size they're being measured against is around 1.5k SLOC.
This is very much "real-world usage" for us. The sort of change sets that come in daily/weekly and are solving non-trivial issues in the respective codebases.
As is usually the case, the most broad claims from both the labs and from the consequent pushback are talking past each other.
I agree, but then we just need meaningful benchmarks that clearly show that! Otherwise it's hand waving about something that should be put on paper in quantifiable terms.
That's the rub. AI benchmarks are IMO, by and large totally unreliable. We think of them as similar to traditional benchmarks of deterministic processes where the number of variables is low. But they're anything but that. Non-deterministic processes with an astounding number of variables and fuzzy acceptance criteria.
It leads to results like these, where if you take it at face value, the only conclusion you can draw is "wow Anthropic must be stupid if Opus takes 1T parameters to do what Qwen can do in 27B."
So advantage is not having to produce your own quantisation / gguf from .safetensors you've linked.
Run the one you linked if you are running vllm (safetensors)
It's a bit bare at the moment, I assume they are going to add further detail later (eg comparison to other quants), similar to their other releases.
I care a lot about speed and efficiency right now. For my setup I would like to have 2-3 different model families. I've settled on GLM-5.3 (formerly Deepseek v4 pro 0813) for architecting, Deepseek V4 Pro 0813 for developing, and Gemini flash lite (any recent cheap model) for repo scouting. I'll add another one in the mix for reviewing (in this case Gemini 3.7) and that's all I need.
I've tried most models except Grok.
Qwen is too expensive IMO (Alibaba Cloud subscriptions are hard to come by and I'm not spending 50 euros a month for a tool, so 18 euros it is). If it ever becomes efficient enough to run locally I will definitely look back.
Claude is slow and expensive (the cache hit prices are absurd).
OAI is pretty good, I might add it to my arsenal seeing how cheap it is.
These opinions change every day. Last week I would've never picked Deepseek until I read about the pricing. even post aug 16 it's worth it (although it's getting close to gemini pricing).
Right now my costs are 12 euros a month (z.ai) + whatever deepseek consumes. This typically isn't more than 8 euros a week. 44 euros a month and I have a setup that is doing pretty well.
Anthropic's recent releases are wordy to the point of exhaustion. Every time I use opus recently I find myself wanting to yell "GET TO THE POINT" at a terminal, which is exacerbated by it being slow.
Dude, GLM-5.3 released _today_.
The phrasing "I've settled on" is incorrect for this context.
What you're currently doing is "testing out"
As capable as it is, it's hard to justify using it when a competing model (e.g. Gemma4:26b-a3b) can consistently achieve the same or similar response with only 1/10th as many 'thinking' tokens, achieve much higher tokens/second, and take a small fraction of the time. I suppose 'YMMV' depending on your use case.
Also, I haven't used it enough yet to see if it's prone to infinite looping, but its predecessors sure were.
What you describe is a engineering harness problem.
If you, and i mean the royal you, actually read tge thinking traces you can see and figure out where its stuck
This means an effective harness would observe when the model is overthinking and step in with reasonable redirection, like increasing logging.
Llamacpp can set reasoning budget and message per reauest, so it can be dynamic.
Your complaint is "skill issue" based and will be resolved by people who do something ither than vibe code react demos.
Just tried using Pi Agent and looks very promising
Unsloth: https://huggingface.co/unsloth/Qwen3.8-27B-GGUF
This might work for you, but I didn't get on very well with MTPLX when I tried it a while back; YMMV: https://huggingface.co/Youssofal/Qwen3.8-27B-MTPLX-Optimized...
2 bpw - ~85.7t/s
3 bpw - ~58.0t/s
4 bpw - ~43.9t/s
6 bpw - ~29.5t/s
8 bpw - ~22.2t/s
16 bpw - ~11.2t/s
without cheating. You'd have to exclude layers, skip operations, etc. basically do stuff the model wasn't trained for. And speed collapses so fast with context that even 2 bpw would be looking at ~37.6t/s after just 128K tokens.
MTP only improves the situation by up to 2x in the ideal case, while drastically reducing the performance floor. While optimizing a 9B model on this hardware, I've found that the GPU just doesn't have enough FLOPS to handle speculating more than one or two tokens ahead on a single stream, regardless of quant level, simply because of the arithmetic cost of the forward pass. The 27B model would be even more expensive than that, potentially such that it's already bottlenecked by the GPU itself rather than memory.
I wouldn't get my hopes up for the 35B-A3B either. Not only is it reportedly much less intelligent, but I hit the exact same 85t/s wall in practice (again with highly specialized inference).
Without speculation I can reach around 120t/s on Qwen3.5-9B and with n-gram speculation (not even MTP; this derivative didn't come with one) around about 150t/s on average. This is on the very very edge of what I'd consider acceptable for me to even consider using such a compact model. YMMV due to the silicon lottery but the situation isn't good.
I saw unsloth has 1bit quants too so I might check that out, anybody have experience with those?
And this is also specifically for the 1bit quant version. I don’t think the fp8 or even fp4 versions have this issue, but I haven’t tried those much
Insane if that is the case. Downloading now!
" The user wants me to explore the repository at XXXX and report back. Let me start by understanding the project structure, reading the CLAUDE.md file, and getting a general overview of what this repository is.
Let me start by reading the main project documentation and exploring the directory structure.
I'll take a look around this repo. Let me start by getting a lay of the land.
read resource CLAUDE.md (ctrl+o to expand)
ENOENT: no such file or directory, access 'XXXX/CLAUDE.md'"
Opus at home
I hope there also will be a new ~10b variant
categorization, information retrieval, semantic search, image description
also with the model as part of an agentic system with tool calling
(edit: it is quite impressive what a small model in a feedback loop can do)
Perf improvements seem to all come from training?
Was considering adding a LoRa/vision head to Flash, but seems like it could take a while to get it right.
If DSv4 Flash was multimodal, I’d probably be done model shopping for a while
So one open weight model might "meet" Opus or whatever on benchmarks, but then fail to follow a simple answer format and also tool call correctly. The models are whipped to within an inch of their lives to strictly adhere to their post training quality gates.
Completely local use is a different story, of course.
https://x.com/sgl_project/status/2088281320422322413
I only trust those users genuine personal tests
https://www.youtube.com/@lukesdevlab
I don't know if that is what you are looking for or not and as always your experiences may be different.
on my dual 3090s qwen 3.5 27b was running at around 110tps using the config from https://github.com/noonghunna/club-3090
make that 200tps on a single 5090, 4x faster than opus https://x.com/radixark/status/2088285681131110446
devs about to get handed a two 5090 box each and told to max that out
my prediction was way too far out. 4.6 at home! Woo.