Qwen3.6-27B NVIDIA NVFP4 no-MTP for 16GB GPUs

Reproducible scripts and deployment notes for a no-MTP derivative of utautako/Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-MTP-GGUF.

The single embedded MTP / next-token-prediction layer is physically removed with llama-quantize in COPY mode. The remaining model tensors and quantization are preserved. This saves 263,314,336 bytes (251.12 MiB) and made a verified full-GPU, 65,536-token deployment possible on one RTX 5060 Ti 16GB using quantized KV cache.

Provenance and scope

This is not a fresh NVFP4 quantization and is not an official Qwen, NVIDIA, utautako, or llama.cpp release. It is a modified GGUF derivative optimized for a tight 16GB VRAM budget.

What changed

The source GGUF declares:

qwen35.block_count = 65
qwen35.nextn_predict_layers = 1

The build script:

  1. prunes layer 64, the embedded MTP layer;
  2. sets qwen35.block_count to 64;
  3. sets qwen35.nextn_predict_layers to 0;
  4. copies all retained tensors without requantizing them.

Expected output:

File: Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-no-MTP.gguf
Size: 15,484,336,608 bytes (14.4209 GiB)
SHA256: 8e319bca3cd808c2cb61e616a124390979c5f6732b293217b4b89fd826b72d7a

Verified configuration

Item Verified value
GPU NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB
Driver 580.173.02
llama.cpp build 10023, commit b3c9d1b84
Context 65,536 tokens
GPU offload all layers
KV cache q4_0 K + q4_0 V
Parallel slots 1
Batch / micro-batch 512 / 64
Observed VRAM after load approximately 15,814 MiB of 16,311 MiB
Short non-thinking generation approximately 24.9 tok/s; single local test, not a standardized benchmark
Controlled TTFT benchmark not yet published

The test establishes that the configuration loads and serves requests. It does not establish identical behavior on every 16GB card, driver, llama.cpp revision, display-attached GPU, or operating system.

Build the derivative

Requirements:

  • the upstream MTP GGUF;
  • a recent llama-quantize supporting --prune-layers and --override-kv;
  • enough free disk space for the source, temporary output, and final output;
  • sufficient RAM or swap for the copy operation.
scripts/build-no-mtp.sh \
  /path/to/Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-MTP.gguf \
  /path/to/Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-no-MTP.gguf

The script refuses to overwrite an existing destination and validates the expected output size and SHA256.

Run at 64K on one 16GB GPU

MODEL=/path/to/Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-no-MTP.gguf \
LLAMA_SERVER=/path/to/llama-server \
scripts/run-64k.sh

Equivalent core command:

llama-server \
  --model Qwen3.6-27B-NVIDIA-NVFP4-no-MTP.gguf \
  --ctx-size 65536 \
  --n-gpu-layers all \
  --split-mode none \
  --flash-attn on \
  --cache-type-k q4_0 \
  --cache-type-v q4_0 \
  --batch-size 512 \
  --ubatch-size 64 \
  --parallel 1 \
  --threads 7 \
  --fit off \
  --spec-type none \
  --jinja

A sample systemd unit is included at systemd/qwen27b.service.

Why no MTP?

The upstream GGUF includes one MTP layer. Merely disabling speculative decoding does not necessarily remove that layer from the model file or VRAM budget. The physical removal saves about 251 MiB. On the verified RTX 5060 Ti configuration, that margin was the difference between a practical 64K full-GPU deployment and an over-constrained setup.

On GPUs with more VRAM, the original MTP build may be faster and is generally preferable when its draft layer and draft KV cache fit without forcing CPU offload.

Limitations

  • Text inference was tested; multimodal inference and an mmproj were not validated here.
  • No standardized quality regression suite has been run specifically against the no-MTP derivative. Removing a speculative draft layer should not change the retained main-model logits, but users should validate their workloads.
  • 64K allocation is extremely tight. Desktop display usage, another CUDA process, larger batches, multiple slots, or different compute buffers can cause OOM.
  • The published performance number is a local observation, not a cross-platform benchmark.

License and attribution

The upstream model and conversion repositories identify Apache-2.0 as their license. This repository includes the Apache License 2.0 text and an attribution notice. Preserve upstream model-card terms and attribution when redistributing the GGUF.

The scripts and documentation authored in this repository are also released under Apache-2.0. See LICENSE, NOTICE, and ATTRIBUTION.md.

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