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Show HN: Maple-Preview – Ternary 20B MoE running at 120 tok/s on a iPhone

169 points · 52 comments · edwardbzhang

  1. beautiful_apple · · focus · HN ↗
    A benchmark table comparing to Qwen 3.5 35B-A3B seems strange when Qwen 3.6 35B-A3B has been out for some time and is significantly better.

    I didn't notice the version difference when first reading the article! So this is a heads up to people like me.

    1. ricardobeat · · focus · HN ↗
      Their main comparison is 1-bit Bonsai 27B (Qwen3.6 27B) which beats A3B anyway.
      1. walrus01 · · focus · HN ↗
        Beats how? In my experience 1-bit bonsai 27B is quite "dumb" when asked a question about a lot of things, as a canned repository of static knowledge from its training dataset. I mean, I literally asked it for a 250 word description of Seattle and it hallucinated a tallest building in the city with an observation deck that doesn't exist, and didn't mention the Space Needle.

        Really basic stuff. But then again, the entire thing was running in <6GB of RAM.

        But before anyone says 1-bit bonsai 27B beats anything, please actually run it and ask it some questions about topics you already know the answer to.

        While Qwen 3.6 35B A3B in Q8 with full context capability (llama-server in no-mmap mode with 262k context will eat 47GB, so not comparable in size either) knows a great deal. The 35B-A3B can even translate multiple pages of English into Farsi and its Farsi output is not far off the quality of what Google Translate does.

        I haven&#x27;t tested something as badly quantized as 35B A3B Q2 which is somewhere around 12GB on disk. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;unsloth&#x2F;Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;huggingface.co&#x2F;unsloth&#x2F;Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-GGUF

        1. dofm · · focus · HN ↗
          I also find that the 35B A3B in Q4 outdoes Ternary Bonsai 27B.

          Mind you, because I am not that interested in long-context, fire-and-forget tasks, I think the faster MoE model has more value generally.

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