Qwen3.8-Flash-Next GGUF
GGUF quantizations of Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next, made with llama.cpp.
Chinese version: README_zh.md
180B total parameters. A MoE core of 125B (48 layers, 512 experts, top-10 plus one shared expert) plus a 51B PLE n-gram lookup table. Hybrid attention: Gated DeltaNet linear attention interleaved with Qwen Sparse Attention (QSA) blocks, wrapped in hyper-connections. Context length up to 262K. The one MTP draft layer in the checkpoint is excluded at conversion time.
Quantized from the official BF16 weights. Every tier is imatrix-calibrated and ships as 8 shards.
Quantizations
| Quant | Size | Shards | BPW | PPL (wikitext-2) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BF16 master | 329.7 GiB | 8 | 15.73 | 1.7164 ± 0.04795 |
IQ4_XS | 118.8 GiB | 8 | 5.67 | 1.8378 ± 0.05554 |
IQ3_XXS | 107.4 GiB | 8 | 5.13 | 2.0528 ± 0.06396 |
IQ2_XS-layered | 83.5 GiB | 8 | 3.98 | 2.7833 ± 0.10058 |
IQ1_M-layered | 76.4 GiB | 8 | 3.65 | 4.4105 ± 0.19322 |
The master row is not a file in this repo. It is listed so the numbers above have a reference point — the BF16 master fits on the PPL machine, so tiers are compared against a real baseline.
The two low tiers use layered quantization (IQ2_XS-layered, IQ1_M-layered):
the 51B PLE n-gram table tolerates heavy compression (measured: Q8_0 → Q4_0
costs nothing), so it is packed at Q4_0, and the space saved is spent on the
expert gate/up projections instead — which improves PPL by ~14% at a smaller
file size than the uniform tier. High tiers stay uniform since they already sit
close to the master.
What is protected
The layers that would hurt most under low-bit compression are kept at higher precision:
| Tensors | Type | Reason |
|---|---|---|
ffn_gate_inp / ffn_gate_inp_shexp | F32 | MoE router; compressing it routes to the wrong experts |
ffn_*_shexp | Q8_0 | the shared expert runs on every token |
ssm_a / ssm_conv1d / ssm_dt / ssm_alpha / ssm_beta / ssm_norm / ssm_out | F32 | Gated DeltaNet linear-attention state; low bit-width destroys long-range recall |
hc_attn_* / hc_ffn_* / output_hc_* | F32 | hyper-connection streams, every layer |
ple_key / ple_value / ple_conv1d | Q8_0 | PLE projection layers |
per_layer_token_embd (51B n-gram table) | Q4_0 | n-gram counts, highly compression-tolerant |
token_embd / output | Q6_K | a global type would otherwise squeeze these hard |
With 512 experts the expert layers dominate the file, so protecting everything else is cheap.
Usage
# Point at the first shard; llama.cpp finds the rest on its own.
llama-cli -m Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-IQ4_XS-00001-of-00008.gguf
Do not pass -ngl manually — llama.cpp fits layers to free VRAM by itself,
and any explicit -ngl aborts that fitting. Leave it off.
Every tier ships as 8 shards. Download all 8 into one directory — you only ever
name -00001-of-00008 on the command line.
About the PPL numbers
wikitext-2 test, n_ctx=512, 12 chunks, every tier through the exact same
command. These numbers are only comparable within this table. Do not compare
them against PPL figures published by other repos.
The BF16 master row is the measured baseline. IQ2_XS-layered / IQ1_M-layered
use layered quantization (see above) — at the same size they beat the uniform
tiers by a wide margin.
License
Qwen Community License 1.0, inherited from Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next — this is not MIT. Quantized by 6block.