Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound (18GB) - with working MTP spec decode
Summary
This article presents a quantized version of the Qwen3.8-27B model using INT4 AutoRound quantization with working MTP for speculative decoding, achieving significant inference speedups on GPUs.
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Cached at: 08/16/26, 04:08 PM
Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound · Hugging Face
Source: https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound
https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound#qwen38-27b-int4-autoroundQwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound
INT4 (W4A16) AutoRound quantization ofQwen/Qwen3.8-27B—18 GB, with theMTP speculative-decoding head quantized and working.
The MTP head is quantized along with the model, so\-\-speculative\-configin vLLM works out of the box and roughlydoubles decode throughput(measured +98 % on temp-0 prose vs the same GPU without MTP; draft acceptance 41–67 % depending on content).
https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound#why-another-int4Why another int4?
At the time of upload, the available 4-bit options either dropped the MTP tensors (no speculative decoding) or kept hundreds of tensors in bf16 (28 GB — no longer fits a 24–32 GB GPU next to a useful KV cache). This one follows the recipe that served Qwen3.6-27B in production for months:
- W4A16, group size 128, symmetric,
auto\_round:auto\_gptqpacking (AutoRound 0.14.2, default tuning) - Quantized blocks:
model\.language\_model\.layersandmtp\.layers - The 96 GDN linear-attention
in\_proj\_a/in\_proj\_btensors are keptbf16(quantizing them hurts the hybrid-attention path far more than it saves) - Vision tower and embeddings untouched (bf16) — multimodal input still works
https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound#measured-vllm-022023Measured (vLLM 0.22/0.23)
SetupResultWeights in VRAM~18.0 GiB (TP1) / 9.1 GiB per rank (TP2)RTX 5090 @400 W cap, TP1, fp8 KV, 215K ctxprefill ~2,580 tok/s (74K cold doc), decode124 tok/swith MTP n=3 / 59 without2× RTX 3090 @200 W cap each, TP2, fp8 KV, 262K ctx2.22× concurrency at full 262,144 ctx; decode ~73 tok/s with MTPMTP draft acceptance41–46 % (prose) · ~67 % (mixed) · higher on code/predictable textTool callingworks with\-\-tool\-call\-parser qwen3\_coder+\-\-enable\-auto\-tool\-choice
https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound#serving-exampleServing example
vllm serve Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound \
--quantization auto_round \
--max-model-len 215000 \
--kv-cache-dtype fp8 \
--enable-prefix-caching \
--reasoning-parser qwen3 \
--enable-auto-tool-choice --tool-call-parser qwen3_coder \
--speculative-config '{"method":"mtp","num_speculative_tokens":3}'
Context is 262,144 native (fits on 2×24 GB at TP2 with fp8 KV; on a single 32 GB card ~215K leaves KV headroom). The base model supports YaRN extension to 1M — see theQwen3.8-27B cardfor therope\_parametersblock; budget ~35 KB of KV per token (fp8) when sizing.
reasoning\_effort(none/low/medium/xhigh) works as in the base model. Note that sendingchat\_template\_kwargs \{"enable\_thinking": false\}makes the template silently ignorereasoning\_effort— use one knob or the other.
https://huggingface.co/Frozenlock/Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound#notesNotes
- All speeds above were measured onpower-cappedGPUs (5090 at 400 W of a 600 W stock limit; 3090s at 200 W of 350 W stock). Stock power limits should do the same or better — the 3090 decode figures in particular leave headroom.
- Calibration: AutoRound default dataset/iters, batch 4 × grad-accum 2, on 4× RTX 3090.
- On Ampere/Blackwell the weights run through the Marlin W4A16 kernels; prefill speed is unchanged vs 8-bit (compute-bound), decode gains come from smaller weight reads, and the big win vs FP8/NVFP4 is the KV-cache room the smaller weights leave.
- Quantized withintel/auto-round0.14.2.
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