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Qwen 3.6 27B is the sweet spot for local development

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

#441

Post by stared »

bensyverson wrote: post #26

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...

All experiments with Qwen 3.6 required no more than 48GB Apple Silicon. I believe you can go even further with more aggressive quantizations - one can go down even further.

In any cases, from the economic point of view, running models on laptops make little sense. Even at the pure cost of energy consumption, it might be hard to beat pricing at tokens generated at scale.

At the same time, it is a breaktrough, that will change the game. Previously such vibe coding on consumer device was not hard or costly - it was impossible.

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

#442

Post by boomskats »

somewhatrandom9 wrote: post #439
iagooar wrote: post #199

I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…

Try using DwarfStar 4 and use the --power flag: https://github.com/antirez/ds4#reducing-heat-power-usage-and...

Can you run Qwen 3.6 27B on antirez/ds4 now? I thought it was all about the DeepSeek models.

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

#443

Post by sanderjd »

greyskull wrote: post #371
sanderjd wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is just the engineer's mindset. It's not surprising that this is a popular view here, even if it is not (and does not need to be) the mainstream perspective.

> mainstream What does "mainstream" refer to when we're talking about software development and LLMs? As opposed to "engineers".

This is a very fair question! When I wrote this comment, I was definitely thinking of the "real" mainstream, i.e. users of llm chat to generate text, not software engineers.

But I think there is (and has always been) also a distinction between the "mainstream" of software developers vs people who are working on new tools and capabilities to be used by that "mainstream".

IMO it is certainly true that the most efficient and cost effective was to do "mainstream" software delivery at the moment is hosted frontier models. But for people thinking about "what's next?", it makes a ton of sense to be exploring different models in anticipation of a possible (but certainly not inevitable) sea change.

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

#445

Post by y1n0 »

jarjoura wrote: post #287
iagooar wrote: post #199

I love my MacBook Pro M5 128GB RAM and I love qwen3.6. BUT DO NOT buy this MacBook if you plan on doing serious coding using local LLMs with it. The reason is simple: your fingers will burn and your head will explode from the noise. Running any kind of sophisticated job on the very laptop you are using is just not viable. Sure you can use it in clamshell mode, but forget touching it while working with AI coding or ag…

TBF, I just recently picked up this same model, and it's reminding me of the last gen Intel i9 MBP. Just visiting any non-basic website spins up the fans and battery life isn't great either. Yes, this thing is fast, but damn it gets hot just using it for normal tasks. Still, I don't agree. I think this machine is meant to use local models. You just have to wear pants if you want to keep it directly on your lap. I rar…

Is there something wrong with the m5s? I have an m4 pro and I’ve never heard the fan on it. I don’t do much with local llms, but I naturally use the web and play games (windows games at that with wine/crossover).

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

#447

Post by bahmboo »

0x0000000 wrote: post #19

> ... 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?

I work with a lot of 3D graphics and geo stuff so I can hit the ceiling with my 48 GB mac. It's not all LLM work. I prioritized more storage than RAM with my budget. Being able to run local llms has greatly helped me understand how they work. For day to day dev I pay for Gemini or Claude.

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

#449

Post by TheCycoONE »

slim wrote: post #369
TheCycoONE wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 32GB of RAM with 16GB VRAM and I haven't had a lot of luck running larger models like this. Are you able to expand on that?

use llama.cpp with cuda

The problem may be that it's a 7800XT which handles memory contention by freezing.

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

#450

Post by somewhatrandom9 »

boomskats wrote: post #442
somewhatrandom9 wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using DwarfStar 4 and use the --power flag: https://github.com/antirez/ds4#reducing-heat-power-usage-and...

Can you run Qwen 3.6 27B on antirez/ds4 now? I thought it was all about the DeepSeek models.

No, I don't think Qwen, but I believe he may try and put some version of GLM in it.
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