Qwen 3.8 27B
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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 just want to run `<some-command> <model-name>` with some default parameters set and for it to run locally.
It's long, I guess, but not cryptic.
You tell llama server where the model is, which context size to use, what to use for the K/V cache quant, that it should do MTP, tune some MTP parameters, and that's kinda it.
Perfectly logical blocks with all the model-specific weirdness (that does exist!) abstracted away.
You could also just run -m <modelfile> and let llama-server do the right-ish thing. The defaults are probably fine, but not how you squeeze out these exact numbers. I think at least. I've never tried. My hubris stopped me from trying auto configs.
You could override, obviously.
If you've tried it, what worked well and what didn't? I'm especially interested in mismatched VRAM setups, e.g. a 16 GB GPU + a 24 GB GPU.
How much overhead did you see from inter-GPU transfers, and did the extra usable VRAM outweigh the performance hit?
[0] https://huggingface.co/froggeric/Qwen-Fixed-Chat-Templates
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.
Edit: link - https://huggingface.co/rico03/Qwen3.6-27B-Claude-Opus-Reason...
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.
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"
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.
I'm sure there's some benchmaxxing going on, and some things you get only with a a larger model.
But I'm feeling pretty confident if not by Gemma 5 than by mid 2028 we'll have local models that are almost always as good as Opus 4.6 was and in many cases far better.
I don't want to try to take my best educated guess at what the best design is BEFORE implementation - especially if you're designing a feature for a codebase you're not an expert in, you don't know like the back of your hand (i.e. one that is mostly or entirely LLM generated).
What sounds good on paper - often times becomes unideal in practice when you get to the reality of implementation.
It may not be worth re-architecting your entire system to get to a "pure" design that would be the best - all things considered.
Instead, I'd like the model to independently design many plausible and coherent good solutions, then implement each of them, then intelligently pick the few winners (after its fixed any bugs that could be causing promising solutions to look artificially bad) - unless there's an obvious one - and then give me the data I need to make an informed decision on which one to go with, all before I even look at the design or implementation.
You're not getting this from a one shot prompt from a 30B model today. You can't even really get it from Sol or Fable - IME. But you can get somewhat close.
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.
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
I'm benchmarking the 3.8 model now, it seems it is better (near-perfect score on my E-mail spam filtering benchmark, best of any model I tested, ever). But it is slow.
One thing I would recommend is keeping an eye on MTP parameters. I tested and benchmarked extensively, and I use `--spec-draft-n-max 2` with llama.cpp. Longer sequences actually decrease overall performance.
As for running, I ended up using llama.cpp and its llama-server, with a bunch of scripts written by AI, because I got tired of LM Studio not implementing the image-related parameters which made gemma4 useless for OCR.
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 a similar ~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.
Most of the benchmark improvements afaict are in agentic and instruction following benchmarks.
Insane if that is the case. Downloading now!
If you want Qwen3.8-27B Serving Configs for the DGX Spark vLLM NVFP4 and RTX 4090 llama.cpp GGUF I added the setups here https://x.com/ErdalToprak/status/2088299678085308761?s=20
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)
Just tried using Pi Agent and looks very promising
https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.6-27b
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.
Perf improvements seem to all come from training?
Completely local use is a different story, of course.
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
Yes, I have a very dumb flow. The harness has a describe_image tool that takes an image and a prompt and so DSv4 Flash uses it to get an idea of what it's looking at.
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
https://x.com/sgl_project/status/2088281320422322413
my prediction was way too far out. 4.6 at home! Woo.
" 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)
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