Qwen3.8-27B-int4-AutoRound (18GB) - with working MTP spec decode

Reddit r/LocalLLaMA Models

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/Qwen3.8-27B18 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-attentionin\_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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