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Finally finished my extensive **Qwen 3 evaluations** across a range of formats and quantisations, focusing on **MMLU-Pro** (Computer Science).
A few take-aways stood out - especially for those interested in local deployment and performance trade-offs:
1️⃣ **Qwen3-235B-A22B** (via Fireworks API) tops the table at **83.66%** with ~55 tok/s.
2️⃣ But the **30B-A3B Unsloth** quant delivered **82.20%** while running locally at ~45 tok/s and with zero API spend.
3️⃣ The same Unsloth build is ~5x faster than Qwen's **Qwen3-32B**, which scores **82.20%** as well yet crawls at <10 tok/s.
4️⃣ On Apple silicon, the **30B MLX** port hits **79.51%** while sustaining ~64 tok/s - arguably today's best speed/quality trade-off for Mac setups.
5️⃣ The **0.6B** micro-model races above 180 tok/s but tops out at **37.56%** - that's why it's not even on the graph (50 % performance cut-off).
All local runs were done with LM Studio on an M4 MacBook Pro, using Qwen's official recommended settings.
**Conclusion:** Quantised 30B models now get you ~98 % of frontier-class accuracy - at a fraction of the latency, cost, and energy. For most local RAG or agent workloads, they're not just good enough - they're the new default.
Well done, Qwen - you really whipped the llama's ass! And to OpenAI: for your upcoming open model, please make it MoE, with toggleable reasoning, and release it in many sizes. *This* is the future!
A few take-aways stood out - especially for those interested in local deployment and performance trade-offs:
1️⃣ **Qwen3-235B-A22B** (via Fireworks API) tops the table at **83.66%** with ~55 tok/s.
2️⃣ But the **30B-A3B Unsloth** quant delivered **82.20%** while running locally at ~45 tok/s and with zero API spend.
3️⃣ The same Unsloth build is ~5x faster than Qwen's **Qwen3-32B**, which scores **82.20%** as well yet crawls at <10 tok/s.
4️⃣ On Apple silicon, the **30B MLX** port hits **79.51%** while sustaining ~64 tok/s - arguably today's best speed/quality trade-off for Mac setups.
5️⃣ The **0.6B** micro-model races above 180 tok/s but tops out at **37.56%** - that's why it's not even on the graph (50 % performance cut-off).
All local runs were done with LM Studio on an M4 MacBook Pro, using Qwen's official recommended settings.
**Conclusion:** Quantised 30B models now get you ~98 % of frontier-class accuracy - at a fraction of the latency, cost, and energy. For most local RAG or agent workloads, they're not just good enough - they're the new default.
Well done, Qwen - you really whipped the llama's ass! And to OpenAI: for your upcoming open model, please make it MoE, with toggleable reasoning, and release it in many sizes. *This* is the future!
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