For coding often quality at the margin is crucial even at a premium. It’s not the same as cranking out spam emails or HN posts at scale. This is why the marginal difference between your median engineer and your P99 engineer is comp is substantial, while the marginal comp difference between your median pick and packer vs your P99 pick and packer isn’t.

I’d also say it keeps the frontier shops competitive while costing R&D in the present is beneficial to them in forcing them to make a better and better product especially in value add space.

Finally, particularly for Anthropic, they are going for the more trustworthy shop. Even ali is hosting pay frontier models for service revenue, but if you’re not a Chinese shop, would you really host your production code development workload on a Chinese hosted provider? OpenAI is sketchy enough but even there I have a marginal confidence they aren’t just wholesale mining data for trade secrets - even if they are using it for model training. Anthropic I slightly trust more. Hence the premium. No one really believes at face value a Chinese hosted firm isn’t mass trolling every competitive advantage possible and handing back to the government and other cross competitive firms - even if they aren’t the historical precedent is so well established and known that everyone prices it in.

I use Opus and the Qwen models. The gap between them is much larger than the benchmark charts show.

If you want to compare to a hosted model, look toward the GLM hosted model. It’s closest to the big players right now. They were selling it at very low prices but have started raising the price recently.

If these results are because of vampire attacks, the results will stop being so good when closed ones figure out how to pollute them when they are sucking answers.

Also, they are not exactly as good when you use them in your daily flow; maybe for shallow reasoning but not for coding and more difficult stuff. Or at least I haven't found an open one as good as closed ones; I would love to, if you have some cool settings, please share

The 27B model they release directly would require significant hardware to run natively at 16-bit: A Mac or Strix Halo 128GB system, multiple high memory consumer GPUs, or an RTX 6000 workstation card.

This is why they don’t advertise which consumer hardware it can run on: Their direct release that delivers these results cannot fit on your average consumer system.

Most consumers don’t run the model they release directly. They run a quantized model that uses a lower number of bits per weight.

The quantizations come with tradeoffs. You will not get the exact results they advertise using a quantized version, but you can fit it on smaller hardware.

The previous 27B Qwen3.5 model had reasonable performance down to Q5 or Q4 depending on your threshold for quality loss. This was usable on a unified memory system (Mac, Strix Halo) with 32GB of extra RAM, so generally a 64GB Mac. They could also be run on an nVidia 5090 with 32GB RAM or a pair of 16GB or 24GB GPUs, which would not run as fast due to the split.

Watch out for some of the claims about running these models on iPhones or smaller systems. You can use a lot of tricks and heavy quantization to run it on very small systems but the quality of output will not be usable. There is a trend of posting “I ran this model and this small hardware” repos for social media bragging rights but the output isn’t actually good.

There are infinite combinations of CPU/GPU capable of running LLMs locally. What most people do is buy the system they can afford and roughly meets their goals and then ball-park VRAM usage by looking at the model size and quantization.

For more a detailed analysis, there are several online VRAM calculators. Here's one: https://smcleod.net/vram-estimator/

If you have a huggingface account, you can set your system configuration and then you get little icons next to each quant in the sidebar. (Green: will likely fit, Yellow: Tight fit, Red: will not fit)

Further, t/s depends greatly on a lot of different factors, the best you might get is a guess based on context size.

One thing about running local LLMs right now, is that there are tradeoffs literally everywhere and you have to choose what to optimize for down to the individual task.

I get ~5 tokens/s on an M4 with 32G of RAM, using:

  llama-server \
   -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:Q4_K_M \
   --no-mmproj \
   --fit on \
   -np 1 \
   -c 65536 \
   --cache-ram 4096 -ctxcp 2 \
   --jinja \
   --temp 0.6 \
   --top-p 0.95 \
   --top-k 20 \
   --min-p 0.0 \
   --presence-penalty 0.0 \
   --repeat-penalty 1.0 \
   --reasoning on \
   --chat-template-kwargs '{"preserve_thinking": true}'

I haven't tested the 27B model yet, but 35B-A3B often gets off rails after 15k-20k tokens of context. You can have it to do basic things reliably, but certainly not at the level of "frontier" models.

Qwen3.5-27B with a 4bit quant can be run on a 24G card with no problem. With 2 Nvidia L4 cards and some additional vllm flags, i am serving 10 developers at 20-25tok/sek, off-peak is around 40tok/sek. Developers are ok with that performance, but ofc they requested more GPU's for added throughput.

For Qwen3.5-27b I'm getting in the 20 to 25 tok/sec range on a 128GB Strix Halo box (Framework Desktop). That's with the 8-bit quant. It's definitely usable, but sometimes you're waiting a bit, though I'm not finding it problematic for the most part. I can run the Qwen3-coder-next (80b MoE) at 36tok/sec - hoping they release a Qwen3.6-coder soon.

Check out https://www.canirun.ai/ (and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47363754)

These might help if the provider doesn't offer the same details themselves. Of course, we have to wait for the newly released models to get added to these sites.

https://llmfit.io/

https://modelfit.io/

For Apple Mac, there is https://omlx.ai/benchmarks

As this is a dense model and it's pretty sizable, 4-bit quantization can be nearly lossless. With that, you can run this on a 3090/4090/5090. You can probably even go FP8 with 5090 (though there will be tradeoffs). Probably ~70 tok/s on a 5090 and roughly half that on a 4090/3090. With speculative decoding, you can get even faster (2-3x I'd say). Pretty amazing what you can get locally.

At 8-bit quantization (q8_0) I get 20 tokens per second on a Radeon R9700.

Fwiw, huggingface does this on the page where you download the weights. Slightly different format though - you put all the hardware you have, and it shows which quants you can run.

Divide the value before the B by 2, and there's your answer if you get a Q4_K_M quant. Plus a bit of room for KV cache.

TLDR: If you have 14GB of VRAM, you can try out this model with a 4-bit quant.

Tokens per second is an unreasonable ask since every card is different, are you using GGUF or not, CUDA or ROCm or Vulkan or MLX, what optimizations are in your version of your inference software, flags are you running, etc.

Note that it's a dense model (the Qwen models have another value at the end of the MoE model names, e.g. A3B) so it will not run very well in RAM, whereas with a MoE model, you can spill over into RAM if you don't have enough VRAM, and still have reasonable performance.

Using these models requires some technical know-how, and there's no getting around that.

depends on format, compute type, quantization and kv cache size.

I would detest the time/words it takes to hand hold through such a review, of teaching folks the basics about LLM like this.

It's also a section that, with hope, becomes obsolete sometime semi soon-ish.

I wonder if this became a so well known "benchmark" that models already got trained for it.

The dragon image has issues like one eye, weird tail etc, but the pelican is imo perfect -- the best I've seen!

A3B-35B is better suited for laptops with enough VRAM/RAM. This dense model however will be bandwidth limited on most cards.

The 5090RTX mobile sits at 896GB/s, as opposed to the 1.8TB/s of the 5090 desktop and most mobile chips have way smaller bandwith than that, so speeds won't be incredible across the board like with Desktop computers.

What laptop has that much VRAM and RAM for $3500 with good/okay-ish Linux support? I was looking to upgrade my asus zephyrus g14 from 2021 and things were looking very expensive. Decided to just keep it chugging along for another year.

Then again, I was looking in the UK, maybe prices are extra inflated there.

Yup! Smaller quants will fit within 24GB but they might sacrifice context length.

I’m excited to try out the MLX version to see if 32GB of memory from a Pro M-series Mac can get some acceptable tok/s with longer context. HuggingFace has uploaded some MLX versions already.

At 4-bit quantization it should already fit quite nicely.

This is probably less likely with this model, as it’s almost certainly a further RL training continuation of 3.5 27b. The bugs with this architecture were worked out when that dropped.

Good advice for all new LLM experimenters.

The bugs come from the downstream implementations and quantizations (which inherit bugs in the tools).

Expect to update your tools and redownload the quants multiple times over 2-4 weeks. There is a mad rush to be first to release quants and first to submit PRs to the popular tools, but the output is often not tested much before uploading.

If you experiment with these on launch week, you are the tester. :)

For at least a year now, it has been clear that data quality and fine-tuning are the main sources of improvement for mediym-level models. Size != quality for specialized, narrow use cases such as coding.

It’s not a surprise that models are leapfrogging each other when the engineers are able to incorporate better code examples and reasoning traces, which in turn bring higher quality outputs.

You should try it out. I'm incredibly impressed with Qwen 3.5 27B for systems programming work. I use Opus and Sonnet at work and Qwen 3.x at home for fun and barely notice a difference given that systems programming work needs careful guidance for any model currently. I don't try to one shot landing pages or whatever.

You should be skeptical. Benchmark racing is the current meta game in open weight LLMs.

Every release is accompanied by claims of being as good as Sonnet or Opus, but when I try them (even hosted full weights) they’re far from it.

Impressive for the size, though!

Opus 4.5 mind you, but I’m not too surprised given how good 3.5 was and how good the qwopus fine tune was. The model was shown to benefit heavily from further RL.

Some of these benchmarks are supposedly easy to game. Which ones should we pay attention to?

A small model can be made to be "comparable to Opus" in some narrow domains, and that's what they've done here.

But when actually employed to write code they will fall over when they leave that specific domain.

Basically they might have skill but lack wisdom. Certainly at this size they will lack anywhere close to the same contextual knowledge.

Still these things could be useful in the context of more specialized tooling, or in a harness that heavily prompts in the right direction, or as a subagent for a "wiser" larger model that directs all the planning and reviews results.

you'd be surprised how good small models have gotten. Size of the model isnt all that matters.

I have been kicking the tires for about 40 minutes since it downloaded and it seems excellent at general tasks, image comprehension and coding/tool-calling (using VLLM to serve it). I think it squeaks past Gemma4 but it's hard to tell yet.

Getting ~36-33 tok/s (see the "S_TG t/s" column) on a 24GB Radeon RX 7900 XTX using llama.cpp's Vulkan backend:

    $ llama-server --version
    version: 8851 (e365e658f)

    $ llama-batched-bench -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:IQ4_XS -npp 1000,2000,4000,8000,16000,32000 -ntg 128 -npl 1 -c 34000
    |    PP |     TG |    B |   N_KV |   T_PP s | S_PP t/s |   T_TG s | S_TG t/s |      T s |    S t/s |
    |-------|--------|------|--------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
    |  1000 |    128 |    1 |   1128 |    1.529 |   654.11 |    3.470 |    36.89 |    4.999 |   225.67 |
    |  2000 |    128 |    1 |   2128 |    3.064 |   652.75 |    3.498 |    36.59 |    6.562 |   324.30 |
    |  4000 |    128 |    1 |   4128 |    6.180 |   647.29 |    3.535 |    36.21 |    9.715 |   424.92 |
    |  8000 |    128 |    1 |   8128 |   12.477 |   641.16 |    3.582 |    35.73 |   16.059 |   506.12 |
    | 16000 |    128 |    1 |  16128 |   25.849 |   618.98 |    3.667 |    34.91 |   29.516 |   546.42 |
    | 32000 |    128 |    1 |  32128 |   57.201 |   559.43 |    3.825 |    33.47 |   61.026 |   526.47 |

128GB (112 GB avail) Strix AI 395+ Radeon 8060x (gfx1151)

llama-* version 8889 w/ rocm support ; nightly rocm

llama.cpp/build/bin/llama-batched-bench --version unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:UD-Q8_K_XL -npp 1000,2000,4000,8000,16000,32000 -ntg 128 -npl 1 -c 34000

    |    PP |     TG |    B |   N_KV |   T_PP s | S_PP t/s |   T_TG s | S_TG t/s |      T s |    S t/s |
    |-------|--------|------|--------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
    |  1000 |    128 |    1 |   1128 |    2.776 |   360.22 |   20.192 |     6.34 |   22.968 |    49.11 |
    |  2000 |    128 |    1 |   2128 |    5.778 |   346.12 |   20.211 |     6.33 |   25.990 |    81.88 |
    |  4000 |    128 |    1 |   4128 |   11.723 |   341.22 |   20.291 |     6.31 |   32.013 |   128.95 |
    |  8000 |    128 |    1 |   8128 |   24.223 |   330.26 |   20.399 |     6.27 |   44.622 |   182.15 |
    | 16000 |    128 |    1 |  16128 |   52.521 |   304.64 |   20.669 |     6.19 |   73.190 |   220.36 |
    | 32000 |    128 |    1 |  32128 |  120.333 |   265.93 |   21.244 |     6.03 |  141.577 |   226.93 |

llama.cpp/build/bin/llama-batched-bench -hf unsloth/Qwen3.6-27B-GGUF:IQ4_XS -npp 1000,2000,4000,8000,16000,32000 -ntg 128 -npl 1 -c 34000

    |    PP |     TG |    B |   N_KV |   T_PP s | S_PP t/s |   T_TG s | S_TG t/s |      T s |    S t/s |
    |-------|--------|------|--------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
    |  1000 |    128 |    1 |   1128 |    2.543 |   393.23 |    9.829 |    13.02 |   12.372 |    91.17 |
    |  2000 |    128 |    1 |   2128 |    5.400 |   370.36 |    9.891 |    12.94 |   15.291 |   139.17 |
    |  4000 |    128 |    1 |   4128 |   10.950 |   365.30 |    9.972 |    12.84 |   20.922 |   197.31 |
    |  8000 |    128 |    1 |   8128 |   22.762 |   351.46 |   10.118 |    12.65 |   32.880 |   247.20 |
    | 16000 |    128 |    1 |  16128 |   49.386 |   323.98 |   10.387 |    12.32 |   59.773 |   269.82 |
    | 32000 |    128 |    1 |  32128 |  114.218 |   280.16 |   10.950 |    11.69 |  125.169 |   256.68 |

at this trajectory, unsloth are going to release the models BEFORE the model drop within the next weeks...