Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-depthaware-GGUF

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B — depth-aware 2-bit GGUF (14.1 GB)

A 35B mixture-of-experts model that runs at 11–14.4 tok/s on a 2016 GTX 1060 — a range, not a number, and the speed section explains why that is the honest way to state it.

Most low-bit quants decide which layers to protect by convention. This one was built from a measurement: every depth band of this specific model was pushed to 2-bit one at a time and scored on held-out text, and the bits went where the damage actually was.

The measurement, the comparison that justifies it, and the raw logs are all linked below. If you only read one line: at byte-identical file size, putting the protection where the probe said removed 29% of the quality loss versus spreading the same protection evenly.

Get it. Use the Files tab above like any other repo, or let the tool that built it fetch the file by name:

pip install quantprobe
quantprobe fetch qwen3.6-35b ./models

Not sure it's worth 14 GB on your hardware? Ask before you download — this reads your machine, not a spec sheet, and names which resource is actually holding you back:

quantprobe plan --model qwen3.6-35b --bits 2.9

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What was measured

Where this model breaks. Each band of 10 layers quantized to Q2_K in turn, rest at Q6_K, scored against a Q6_K reference (PPL 5.4669) on held-out WikiText-2:

Monotone, back-heavy. The last quarter of the network is where 2-bit hurts, so that is what this build protects at Q4_K while the rest of the expert FFNs go to Q2_K.

Pre-registered before the probe ran: prereg #103 · raw log: prereg103_probe_qwen36.log

Does that actually pay? Tested against a deliberately strong control — the same ten layers protected at the same tier, but spread evenly across depth (0, 4, 8 … 36) instead of on the measured band. Both files are byte-identical: 14,115,658,720 bytes.

29.2% less quality loss, at zero byte cost, with decode speed unchanged (1.22% apart).

Pre-registered before either arm was scored, including the size gate that rejected the first control for being 9% smaller: prereg #104 · raw log: prereg104_ppl.log

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Speed: a range, and why it cannot be a single number

Corrected 2026-08-18. This card previously said 14.86 ± 0.36 tok/s. That was a real llama-bench run with N=5 and a 2.4% error bar — and we could not reproduce it. Six fresh runs of the identical command, same box, same binary, same file, never reached it. The correction is published here at the same size as the original claim.

On a GTX 1060 6GB / 16GB DDR4-3000 / i5-7600K, llama.cpp b10098, -ngl 12, tg128:

Why it moves. This file is 13.15 GiB and the machine has ~12.2 GB of free RAM. The weights do not fit, so they cannot all stay resident in page cache, and part of every decode pass streams off disk. Throughput therefore depends on how much of the file the OS is currently holding — which climbs across consecutive runs and collapses when something else needs memory. The original 14.86 was measured minutes after the quantizer wrote the file, when it was at its hottest.

Measured, six consecutive runs of one unchanged command: 13.04 → 13.14 → 13.89 → 14.33 → 14.43 → 14.23. A 4.68 GB model that does fit free RAM, same box same command, holds a 2.1% spread with no ramp at all. The instability is the size relationship, not the machine.

What this means for you. With more than ~14 GB free RAM, expect the warm figures and a stable number. With less, expect it to move, and expect your first run to be the slowest one.

llama-server -m Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-depthaware-Q2K.gguf -ngl 12

Use -ngl 12 on a 6 GB card. Pushing more layers onto the GPU is 3× slower here (4.84 at -ngl 24) — a VRAM-overcommit cliff, not a gentle curve. CPU-only measures 7.40 ± 2.09.

Do NOT try to "warm the cache" by reading the file first. We tested it: cat-ing the whole 13.15 GiB before benchmarking gave 11.89 tok/s, worse than the 14.43 the box had just reached, and 1.95 below the six-run mean. A file bigger than RAM cannot be held whole, so a sequential read leaves the cache holding the file's last ~12 GB, while real runs leave it holding the pages the model actually re-reads — the hot experts. Priming swaps a frequency-adapted cache for a position-adapted one. Just run it twice instead.

One number we are still NOT publishing. A different placement (-ngl 99 -ot exps=CPU) predicted 22.7 tok/s and measured 9.94 ± 5.40 — an error bar over half the value. That measurement is unusable, so the prediction it was meant to test is recorded as unscored, not as a hit or a miss.

Full record, including the two predictions that went against us: prereg #106 (scored 2/4) and prereg #105 (VOID — its premise died at its own reference arm).

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Honest limits

• Perplexity is a proxy, not a task score. 32 chunks of WikiText-2 ranks two builds; it does not tell you this model is good at your work. No task benchmarks (MATH, GSM8K, IFEval) have been run on this build yet.
• One box, one eval, one machine state. Everything above was measured on a single 2016 desktop. Different hardware will give different speeds and may give a different -ngl optimum.
• 2-bit is 2-bit. The reference this is measured against is Q6_K, and the gap is real (+0.31 PPL). This build exists for people who otherwise could not run a 35B at all. If a Q4_K_M fits your machine, run that instead.
• The fragile band is measured for this model. A sibling check found Qwen3.5-35B-A3B fragile in the same band (30-39), which is evidence recipes survive a version bump — but that is two models, not a law.

Provenance

Built with quantprobe from Qwen3.6-35B-A3B Q8_0:

quantprobe quantize --gguf Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Q8_0.gguf --recipe qwen3.6-35b

The recipe is a committed JSON with its own evidence: quantprobe/recipes/qwen3.6-35b.json

Tensor layout: attention and SSM at Q4_K · shared experts at Q8_0 · expert FFN layers 0-29 at Q2_K · expert FFN layers 30-39 at Q4_K · token embedding Q4_K.

Every claim on this page regenerates from committed data by committed code. Predictions here were staked before measurement, and the misses are published at the same size as the hits — including the unscored one above.

License: inherits the base model's license from Qwen/Qwen3.6-35B-A3B. Check the upstream repository before commercial use.