Qwen 3.6 vs 3.5: Same 37 tok/s on RTX 4070, +43% on Frontend Generation
The first number I saw on Qwen3.6-35B-A3B was 12 tok/s . I almost hit publish on "Qwen regressed at generation speed" and moved on. The 3.5 baseline on the same RTX 4070 was 34.6 tok/s. A new generation running at a third of the old one would have been a hell of a headline. It was also completely wrong. The culprit was not the model. Another process on the box was sitting on 9-11 GB of VRAM, so the layers that were supposed to live on the GPU were spilling to system RAM. The tell was that my sanity-check run of Qwen3.5 slowed down too. When two independent models degrade together, the model is not the variable. I killed the offending process, re-measured, and got numbers that told a completely different story. Model Generation speed tg128 (tok/s) Runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B 38.76 ± 0.82 avg of 3 Qwen3.5-35B-A3B 36.7 ± 1.4 avg of 3 (range 34.9-38.6) Both models sit inside the ±1.5 tok/s band on the same RTX 4070. On the tokens-per-second axis, "the new generation" is not a story. Same architecture, same activated-parameter count (3B active out of 35B), same MoE routing pattern. The half-speed regression was a measurement bug, and it lived for about half a day before its own inconsistency killed it. The lesson I keep re-learning: when the number you got is dramatically convenient for your narrative, measure it again before you write anything. The moment I could sell 12 tok/s as a regression, I should have been suspicious. The version of me that ran the second test earned the version of me that got to keep his self-respect. So where did the generation move to? If speed did not change, does the 3.5-to-3.6 bump mean anything? It does. The move lives on a different axis. The official Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model card publishes benchmarks with a very lopsided shape: Benchmark Qwen3.5 Qwen3.6 Lift Terminal-Bench 2.0 40.5 51.5 +27% QwenWebBench (frontend generation) 978 1,397 +43% SWE-bench Pro 44.6 49.5 +11% LiveCodeBench v6 74.6 80.4 +8% SWE-bench Verified 70.0 73.4 +5% AIME26 91.0 92.7