Live data from Hacker News

Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

quesma.com

51–60 of 809 posts

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#51

> ... on my Macbook Max M5 128 GB Local development for who ? How many of y'all are rocking 128GB of memory? Am I reading Apple's site correctly that it's a $10,000 laptop?

A 27B model can fit easily on a 32GB VRAM card (e.g. 5090) or a 32GB computer in RAM at FP8/Q8 (unsloth have 28.6GB Q8 files).

For 24GB VRAM cards (e.g. 4090) you can use Q6_K (22.5GB) or Q5_K_M (19.5GB) quants, possibly offloading some of the weights to RAM.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#52
post #20

None of the examples reflect 'real work', at least not what I'd consider real work. Being able to nail a zero-shot greenfield project is relatively easy even for a small model. There's not much context to build up and it can fall back to similar examples in the training data easily. So long as you're not asking it to invent something wholly new it'll probably manage. The real test is whether or not it can work with y…

> In my limited experiments Qwen 3.5 (maybe 3.6 is loads better)

1. Maybe you should tell us what those limited experiments are.

2. Maybe you should actually try 3.6 because it's huge difference in most cases. Don't forget to tell us quants and don't forget to tell us scope.

3. Maybe actually show us data compared to frontier models instead of this... vibe comment. Pretty tired of this kind of comments on HN that doesn't require logic or evidence. Just vibes. Like the pelican riding a bicycle crap that everyone has taken for granted but has no objective way of assessing goodness.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#53

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

Just putting it out there: I run Qwen 3.6 on my M1 Mac Studio with 64gb. It's quantized and all that, but I agree with TFA: it's the sweet spot for local development right now.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#54

FWIW I'm running gemma4 31b on my 5090 and it's pretty great as well. QAT, MTP, 128k context. I liked Qwen 3.6 27b too, it just seems that Gemma4 is a bit underrated.

Nice. I flip flop between Qwen 3.5 9B Q6_M and Gemma4 12B Q4_K_M on a 4080 Super. They run at about the same speed and I can have them review each other's plan or diffs. For smaller projects I find them very capable, and I can step up to a better quant for slightly more challenging work.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#55

FWIW I'm running gemma4 31b on my 5090 and it's pretty great as well. QAT, MTP, 128k context. I liked Qwen 3.6 27b too, it just seems that Gemma4 is a bit underrated.

My experience also aligns with this. I'm running gemma4 31B on a 4090 through llm.cpp with unsloth models. I also run Qwen 3.6. Qwen is good for thinking and planning as it is faster, but Gemma4's generated code is much higher quality in the first try (Rust, C++ and C#). so it needs less revisions to be at a level I'm comfortable for merging.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#56

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

I’m running the same model on a 48GB MBP with a q4 quant and it’s pretty decent. You definitely don’t 128GB. That’s the scale for 70B models at q8 or something.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you have to factor in that this device will last you 5-10 years. That said, I wouldn't spend almost $7k USD on this macbook lol.

Memory requirements of newer models will increase, so while the hardware may last 10 years it won't be able to run the latest models for 10 years.

Will they? Or will we find ways to optimize models and need less? Only time will tell.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#58

The article is based on running Qwen 3.6 on a 128GB MacBook Pro. For reference, a 128GB MBP currently starts at $6699 USD [0] Some people will be happy to pay that premium for privacy, but at roughly 10X the cost of a MacBook Neo, that money could also buy a lot of credits on OpenRouter or frontier labs. [0]: https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro/14-inch-space...

I have a 1500 dollar machine that can run it at 50 tok/s (3 V100s)

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#59

> ... on my Macbook Max M5 128 GB Local development for who ? How many of y'all are rocking 128GB of memory? Am I reading Apple's site correctly that it's a $10,000 laptop?

Certainly won't work on my M4 Pro with 24GB lol

I feel you!

Sent from my 8gb M2 Mac mini.

Re: Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

#60
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> maybe tell us how much a non-Apple system that you can run that (probably similarly or faster) would cost? Ryzen AI Max 395+ with 128GB of unified memory can be found around $3-4k. But 27B isn't that large, either, especially if you are ok with the quantized models. So this laptop choice seems to more be a "because they had it" rather than "this is what's necessary for this particular workflow"

That's my point. You can run Qwen3.6 27B with MTP and whatever else you want to bolt onto it at 256k context for much less than even a Ryzen AI Max 395+ with 128GB would cost. Even unquantized you don't need 128 GB so given your comment and the downvotes maybe I didn't word my original comment properly for this?
Post reply on HN