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Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

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Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#72
post #2

A bit skeptical about a 27B model comparable to opus...

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.

If all you're looking at is benchmarks that might be true, but those are way too easy to game. Try using this model alongside Opus for some work in Rust/C++ and it'll be night and day. You really can't compare a model that's got trillions of parameters to a 27B one.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direct…

Yea, this is currently the confusing part of running local models for newbies: Even after you have decided which model you want to run, and which org's quantizations to use (let's just assume Unsloth's for example), there are often dozens of quantizations offered, and choosing among them is confusing. Say you have a GPU with 20GB of VRAM. You're probably going to be able to run all the 3-bit quantizations with no pro…

We made Unsloth Studio which should help :)

1. Auto best official parameters set for all models

2. Auto determines the largest quant that can fit on your PC / Mac etc

3. Auto determines max context length

4. Auto heals tool calls, provides python & bash + web search :)

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#74
What competitive advantage does OpenAI/Anthropic has when companies like Qwen/Minimax/etc are open sourcing models that shows similar (yet below than OpenAI/Anthropic) benchmark results?

Also, the token prices of these open source models are at a fraction of Anthropic's Opus 4.6[1]

[1]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/#pricing

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#75
post #74

What competitive advantage does OpenAI/Anthropic has when companies like Qwen/Minimax/etc are open sourcing models that shows similar (yet below than OpenAI/Anthropic) benchmark results? Also, the token prices of these open source models are at a fraction of Anthropic's Opus 4.6[1] [1]: https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/#pricing

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.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#76

I wish that all announcements of models would show what (consumer) hardware you can run this on today, costs and tok/s.

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.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#77
post #15

Unsloth quants available: https://unsloth.ai/docs/models/qwen3.6

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 |
More directly comparable to the results posted by genpfault (IQ4_XS):

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 |

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#78
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

good to hear! Do you mind sharing your setup and tokens / seconds performance ?

I'm running the unquantized base model on 2xA6000s (Ampere gen, 48GB each). Runs at about 25 tokens/second.

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#79

I wish that all announcements of models would show what (consumer) hardware you can run this on today, costs and tok/s.

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.

What would be these additional vllm flags, if you don't mind sharing?

Re: Qwen3.6-27B: Flagship-Level Coding in a 27B Dense Model

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direct…

Yea, this is currently the confusing part of running local models for newbies: Even after you have decided which model you want to run, and which org's quantizations to use (let's just assume Unsloth's for example), there are often dozens of quantizations offered, and choosing among them is confusing. Say you have a GPU with 20GB of VRAM. You're probably going to be able to run all the 3-bit quantizations with no pro…

> Say you have a GPU with 20GB of VRAM. You're probably going to be able to run all the 3-bit quantizations with no problem, but which one do you choose? Unsloth offers[1] four of them: UD-IQ3_XXS, Q3_K_S, Q3_K_M, UD-Q3_K_XL

There are actually two problems with this:

First, the 3-bit quants are where the quality loss really becomes obvious. You can get it to run, but you’re not getting the quality you expected. The errors compound over longer sessions.

Second, you need room for context. If you have become familiar with the long 200K contexts you get with SOTA models, you will not be happy with the minimal context you can fit into a card with 16-20GB of RAM.

The challenge for newbies is learning to identify the difference between being able to get a model to run, and being able to run it with useful quality and context.

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