Dense 60-120B

#44
by rtzurtz - opened

Qwen3.6-27B says that to see a significant improvement, a minimum target of 60-80B parameters would be required and an ideal target, for major gains, would be 100-130B.

Motivation:

  • High RAM/memory prices, especially RAM.
  • A dense model provides a much better performance for a given parameter size (see¹ for what it's worth) vs a MoE model.
  • My 70 GB (64 GB RAM + 12 GB VRAM - 6 GB for the OS + x GB for the context) can't fit a good, UD-Q4_K_M, 122B quant, but can easily fit the better performing (at least according to¹ and also various comments) 27B quant.
  • For me and from comments, for many, speed can be much less relevant for a high quality answer.
  • That being said, a 60B Q4_K_M quant (approx. 40 GB) will still fit in a 2 x 24 GB setup and run pretty fast.
  • The 6.4 times (5984744/932498) higher monthly download count for the 27B dense vs 122B MoE may confirm the limited memory for many (yes, the 27B is the newer Qwen3.6, but the 3.5-122B has never been as popular as 3.5-27B (2452527 monthly downloads)).

¹ https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=qwen3-6-27b-non-reasoning%2Cqwen3-5-122b-a10b%2Cqwen3-5-122b-a10b-non-reasoning%2Cqwen3-6-27b%2Cqwen3-6-35b-a3b-non-reasoning%2Cqwen3-6-35b-a3b&intelligence=artificial-analysis-intelligence-index

Well… the thing is that a 27B dense model will reliably outperform a 35B MoE (or larger) model as long as the payload stays within a reasonable range — say, up to ~128k tokens. Once you cross that line, a small dense model may (or may not) start losing a bit of attention stability (minor language slips, small factual inconsistencies, etc.) Not because it’s “stupid”, but simply because it’s too small to maintain a perfectly stable attention matrix at very large context sizes — mathematics always wins.

Moreover, in real‑world use I would never choose a Q4‑quantized 60B over a smaller dense BF16/FP16 model for strictly logical, multi‑layer reasoning tasks where a high-quality answer is expected. Quantization noise (plus MoE routing noise) accumulates, and deep causal reasoning suffers.

A genuinely intelligent model (see Qwen3.6 27B) doesn’t need a full Wikipedia baked into its weights — it can compensate for missing knowledge through external tools. Intelligence is the most valuable property of Qwen3.6, unless the model is used purely for casual chatbot tasks.

Regards,
/WS

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