Ternary Qwen3.8-27B runs on 8GB VRAM, claims 98.2% of original smarts under $500

alexcovo_eth · x · 2026-09-19

@0xSero reports PrismML has built a ternary quantized version of Qwen3.8-27B: 9x smaller, retaining 98.2% of the original performance, runnable on 8GB of VRAM or 16-24GB of Mac unified memory for under $500 of hardware.
The claim is that it beats GPT-5.6-Luna High, Opus-4.6-Max and Gemini-3.1-Pro, and ties GLM-5.2 Max and Gemini-3.6-Flash.
Caveat: separate hands-on reports say such extreme-compression models perform far worse in real use than benchmarks suggest.

More from Models