Model Spend Arena2ND ED.
35B · dense · 2026-10-10

Qwen3.6 35B A3B

Runs on ≤32 GB · Hugging Face ↗

llama.cppvLLMLM Studio

AA coding index 41.9 (Artificial Analysis, frozen since 2026-09-11)

A 35B-total MoE with ~3B active — fast decoding for its capability, but all 35B of experts load into VRAM.

First-party test · not the AA coding index

BigCodeBench-Hard pass@1 28% (41/148), via official protocol · llama.cpp Q4_K_XL · one request at a time · a shared cluster GPU · mean of 3 runs, range 0.0 pp. The brutal counterpart to HumanEval — where HumanEval saturates near the top, BCB-Hard spreads the field, so this is the number that actually separates coding ability.

What we measured

Our own runs on this model. Each number carries how many problems it is over and how many times we ran it — these are not comparable with each other, and none of them is on the same scale as the third-party indices on the leaderboard.

testscoreoverconditions
BigCodeBench-Hard27.7%n=148 · 3 run(s)official protocol · llama.cpp Q4_K_XL · one request at a time · a shared cluster GPU · mean of 3 runs, range 0
BFCL v4 non-live82.3% ± 2.5n=1150 · 1 run(s)BFCL v4 · Q4KXL GGUF via llama.cpp · one request at a time · a shared cluster GPU
Tool use · BFCL v4 non-live · first-party

82.3% ± 2.5 over 1150 problems

Q4KXL · a shared cluster GPU · KV f16 · 1 run · spread between runs assumed at 0.25 points, not measured. This is the non-agentic half of BFCL: does the model call the right function with the right arguments. It says nothing about how it behaves over a long agentic conversation, which is a separate measurement. The score is BFCL’s own: the unweighted mean of four groups (simple, multiple, parallel, parallel multiple), where simple is itself the mean of Python, Java and JavaScript. Every group counts the same whatever its size, and irrelevance detection — which we also measure, another 240 problems — is not part of it. The margin follows that same weighting.

Sizes on disk

Real GGUF file sizes = weight VRAM. Add the KV cache for your context (≈1 GB at 32K, fp16). Read from the GGUF header and checked against what llama.cpp actually allocates.

QuantizationSize
IQ1_M11.4 GB
IQ2_XXS11.8 GB
IQ2_M11.9 GB
Q2_K_XL12.6 GB
IQ3_XXS14.1 GB
IQ3_S15.3 GB
Q3_K_M17.1 GB
Q3_K_XL17.2 GB
IQ4_XS18.2 GB
IQ4_NL18.5 GB
Q4_K_S21.4 GB
MXFP422.2 GB
Q4_K_M22.7 GB
Q4_K_XL22.9 GB
Q5_K_S25.5 GB
Q5_K_M27.1 GB
Q5_K_XL27.2 GB
Q6_K30.0 GB
Q6_K_XL32.6 GB
Q8_037.8 GB
Q8_K_XL39.1 GB
BF1671.1 GB

Config tips

~21 GB at Q4; plan for the full size, not the 3B active. MoE offload to CPU lets a 24 GB card run it slower if you are short on VRAM.