What hardware do you need to run Qwen3.8 Flash Next?
Qwen3.8 Flash Next at Q4_K_M is 120 GB of weights, with a context ceiling of 256k tokens. Not yet rated: released after our last ratings pass. The strongest open model that fits in 128 GB, and the only one within reach of the hosted mid-tier.
How good is it, really?
On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3 it scores 40, which puts it in the Sonnet-class band. In the same league as the labs' mainstream models on this index. Score source. See the whole table.
- Summarising — not rated
- Translation — not rated
- Everyday coding — not rated
- Reasoning & maths — not rated
- Agentic work — not rated
What it costs either way
Renting the same model costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.47 per million output (OpenRouter, cheapest active endpoint, checked 2026-09-09). Buying a machine only beats that if you use it hard enough, for long enough, that the hardware price divides down below the rental bill.
Machines that run it
| Machine | Price | Speed at 32k | Pay-back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mac Studio M5 Ultra, 256GB | $10,799 | 74 tok/s estimated | Pays back in 372 years | Run the numbers |
One machine per family, cheapest first. Speeds are measured where a public benchmark exists and estimated from memory bandwidth otherwise; the calculator says which for any configuration.
The specifics
- Parameters
- 180B, of which 6B are active per token
- Quantisation
- Q4_K_M
- Weights on disk
- 120 GB
- KV cache
- 0.9 GB at 32k context — Hybrid: 12 of 48 layers hold a growing cache, and each also runs a sparse-attention indexer with its own cache, adding about 12% on top of the plain figure.
- Maximum context
- 256k tokens (256k)
- Licence
- qwen-community-1.0
- Sources
- source 1