Hands-on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B (23GB 4bit GGUF) on M1 Max 64GB via Ollama 0.20.6. Generation speed stays at 27 tok/s — same as Qwen3.5-35B-A3B — but the same prompt produces 13× more thinking tokens. Multi-turn behavior, persona handling, and a three-tier NSFW probe included.
Alibaba's Qwen team released Qwen3.6-35B-A3B as open weights. A 40-layer hybrid of Gated DeltaNet, Gated Attention, and MoE hits 73.4 on SWE-bench Verified, 37.0 on MCPMark, and 1397 on QwenWebBench.
I tested local Vision LLMs (Gemma 3, Qwen2.5-VL, Llama 3.2 Vision, Gemma 4) to see if they could look at character illustrations and pixel art and generate RPG-style stats in JSON format.
Foundry Local is a local AI runtime that embeds into apps via package managers as a ~20MB native library. Built on ONNX Runtime with automatic GPU/NPU selection, it runs Phi, Qwen, Mistral and more offline through an OpenAI-compatible API.
Benchmarking NII's LLM-jp-4-32B-A3B-thinking on EVO-X2 (Ryzen AI Max+ 395) with ROCm. 62.9 t/s vs Qwen3.5-35B-A3B's 44.7 t/s. Covers thinking control issues, KV cache trade-offs, knowledge cutoff, Japanese quality comparisons, code generation tests, and training data composition.
Lemonade is AMD's open-source local AI server that manages multiple backends like llama.cpp and FastFlowLM across GPU/NPU/CPU, serving text, image, and audio generation through an OpenAI-compatible API.
Google DeepMind has released Gemma 4: four models—31B dense, 26B MoE (A4B), E4B, and E2B—with a 256K context, multimodal input, tool calling, and support for 140 languages.
SwiftLM, an Apple Silicon–only MLX inference server, provides a native Metal implementation of TurboQuant V2+V3 hybrid KV‑cache compression and NVMe SSD expert streaming.
Ollama 0.19 switches the Apple Silicon backend to MLX, achieving 1,810 tokens/s prefill and 112 tokens/s decode. NVFP4 quantization support and cache improvements landed at the same time.
Only 10 of 40 layers in Qwen3.5-35B-A3B consume KV cache (SSM+Attention hybrid), so raising llama-server ctx-size from 4096 to 65536 cost just 800MB VRAM with no throughput drop. Measured on Ryzen AI Max+ 395 (Strix Halo), with q8_0 KV quant numbers.
Hypura breaks away from llama.cpp’s mmap design and streams even dense models with a three-tier NVMe placement, while TurboQuant eliminates quantization-constant overhead via a polar-coordinate transform. Includes a design comparison with Flash‑MoE and a review of scenarios where KV‑cache compression actually helps.