Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-NVFP4-NoMTP-GGUF

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B NVFP4 No-MTP GGUF

Base Model

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B by Alibaba Qwen Team — a 35B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model with only 3B active parameters per token. Apache 2.0 licensed. Supports 131K+ context, tool use, and multilingual tasks across 100+ languages.

Why No MTP?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B ships with Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) heads for speculative decoding. However, on MoE models like this one, MTP heads waste ~1-2 GB of VRAM with no measurable speed benefit — the bottleneck is expert routing through system RAM (when using --cpu-moe), not draft token verification. This build strips the MTP heads with --no-mtp to reclaim that VRAM for the KV cache and expert weights, resulting in better performance on 16GB cards.

Quantization

• Format: NVIDIA FP4 (NVFP4) — 4-bit E2M1 values with E4M3 scaling per 16 values + FP32 tensor scale
• BPW: 4.55 bits per weight
• Size: 19.7 GB
• Target hardware: NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs (RTX 50 series) — requires CUDA kernels at inference

Tested Settings (llama.cpp build 1324+, RTX 5060 Ti 16GB)

llama-cli -m qwen3.6-35b-a3b-nvfp4-nomtp.gguf \
  -ngl 99 --cpu-moe \
  --ctx-size 131072 \
  --flash-attn on \
  --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0 \
  -t 8 --temp 0.7 --top-k 20 --top-p 0.95

Performance Results

Usage

llama.cpp CLI (text generation)

llama-cli -m qwen3.6-35b-a3b-nvfp4-nomtp.gguf   -ngl 99 --cpu-moe   -c 131072   --flash-attn on   --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0   -p "Your prompt here"

llama.cpp Server (API)

llama-server -m qwen3.6-35b-a3b-nvfp4-nomtp.gguf   -ngl 99 --cpu-moe   -c 131072   --flash-attn on   --cache-type-k q8_0 --cache-type-v q8_0   --host 0.0.0.0 --port 8080

Requirements

• llama.cpp build 700+ with CUDA support
• NVIDIA GPU with 16GB+ VRAM (tested on RTX 5060 Ti 16GB)
• --cpu-moe flag required — routes MoE expert weights to system RAM while keeping attention on GPU
• --flash-attn on recommended for memory efficiency at long context

Notes

• Q8_0 KV cache recommended for quality — Q4_0 saves ~3 GB VRAM but loses precision
• Model uses --cpu-moe because NVFP4 weights (~19.7 GB) exceed 16GB VRAM; experts stream from RAM at ~611 MB per token
• For MXFP4_MoE variant (expert weights MXFP4, non-expert Q8_0), see MXFP4_MoE repo

License

Apache 2.0 (inherited from base model)