Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s
Posted by altertable 5 days ago
Comments
Comment by nostrebored 5 days ago
Even trying it out, it seems like our account has gotten moved to some limbo where we can no longer add billing information.
``` Billing access restricted Self-serve billing is not available on Enterprise accounts. Please contact your team for further questions. ```
We have no team (they removed themself from our slack channel after we talked about rate limits). Perplexingly, none of this even shows up in the request, which gives:
``` {"message":"Model does not exist or you do not have access to it.","type":"not_found_error","param":"model","code":"model_not_found"} ```
When the error is really about billing.
I always want to like Cerebras, but I get the vibe that as a tokens in tokens out consumer you are not valued at all.
Comment by Aurornis 5 days ago
I don't understand. How does that make it unusable? Is the limit shared by an entire team at once?
150,000 tokens per minute is a lot. You could start hitting that with a lot of concurrent requests in your session, but even throttled to 150k TPM it's still going to be faster than anything else you find.
I think the 128K context limit is the real ceiling. These models aren't amazing at long context, but once you account for a short input prompt, the input files, and headroom for a compaction summary, there isn't a lot left for the problem.
Comment by wild_egg 5 days ago
I was very excited last year for their coding plan but seeing a burst of requests pulse and then sitting there watching the cooldown reset is really not a great time.
Even though each individual request was fast, the sessions were only maybe 10% faster on wall clock time since there was so much waiting time.
Comment by kristjansson 4 days ago
Seems like an Amdahl’s law of inference economics? there’s so much compute relative to SRAM on the chip and shoreline bandwidth onto the chip that caching buys ~nothing? The contended resource is SRAM and a given token of context needs just as much as another.
Comment by vlovich123 4 days ago
I don’t know why they don’t give a price discount. Maybe their hardware is incapable for some reason of saving/restoring the state? Or maybe they just haven’t built the infrastructure to do it?
Comment by jmalicki 3 days ago
I am unsure if it is incapable, but it sounds hard.
They have tons of cores with 64k of SRAM each, and relatively slow paths in/out.
On a GPU you can leave it in SRAM. On Cerebras, you have to send it out of the system which is a giant bottleneck.
Comment by amelius 5 days ago
Comment by jychang 5 days ago
Comment by sandworm101 5 days ago
Comment by ma2kx 5 days ago
Comment by embedding-shape 5 days ago
Comment by interactivecode 4 days ago
Comment by nateb2022 4 days ago
Comment by gerdesj 5 days ago
"Context Length: 262,144 natively and extensible up to 1,000,000 tokens."
Comment by datadrivenangel 5 days ago
Comment by conception 5 days ago
Comment by devy 5 days ago
Comment by gerdesj 5 days ago
I did benchmark it in various ways and it runs quite well but it is a quantised jobbie and 1.5k t/s is also rather faster than anything I can possibly hope to achieve.
To run that model at those sorts of speeds is going to need some serious investment and you are going to have to pay for it.
Comment by conception 4 days ago
Comment by jacquesm 5 days ago
Comment by wincy 4 days ago
Comment by kristjansson 4 days ago
Comment by jacquesm 4 days ago
We run a pretty large rig, 10 GPUs right now (this goes up and down with various experiments, getting this many GPUs to play nice at x16 GEN4 with any motherboard is a challenge), 240G VRAM in total. 256G RAM and a TR PRO. For small models the comms overhead is larger than the gains so there I have to reduce the number of active GPUs. On this machine I'm getting between 150 and 200 tg/s with FP8, but it took a lot of time and tweaking to get to that, and not all of the improvements held up when combined with other improvements. I've been playing with this stuff for a while now and it is interesting how fast the frontier is moving and how much you can now do on your own hardware. For larger models the communications overhead is low enough that we can run them on bigger groups of GPUs, and using hacked drivers to give us p2p capabilities on some of our GPUs also boosts performance considerably once you start to hit communications limits. Typically we get 50G/second in p2p mode (full duplex, half that one way).
From a cost perspective running locally is not interesting, but it allows us to do experiments that model providers would likely balk at, gives us censorship free access and allows us to work with data that we would not want to share with model providers (or can't share due to NDAs).
I will look into running ninfer, I was aware of them but had not yet gotten around to using it.
Comment by a012 5 days ago
Comment by 0xbadcafebee 5 days ago
Comment by LoganDark 4 days ago
Comment by gpugreg 4 days ago
Comment by LoganDark 4 days ago
Comment by nostrebored 4 days ago
Comment by puppymaster 4 days ago
Comment by ryukoposting 4 days ago
Comment by olivermuty 5 days ago
Comment by dd8601fn 5 days ago
Comment by ericd 5 days ago
Comment by vel0city 4 days ago
Not as flexible as Cerebras though. And I'd love for someone who knows more to clue me in to the truth.
Comment by ericd 4 days ago
But in exchange, you get insane speed and great energy efficiency. I could see it being a great approach for basic "good enough" models.
They may have had a little flexibility by supporting finetuning via LoRAs.
Comment by liamwire 4 days ago
Comment by ericd 4 days ago
Comment by runako 4 days ago
Comment by ericd 4 days ago
Comment by Tuna-Fish 4 days ago
But also, the model weights are in a single mask rom layer, high up in the metal stack. They could manufacture the die specialized for a given geometry of a model up to that layer, wait for updated weights, and then get the final product out in weeks after they got the weights, instead of many months which is what it would take to redesign the whole chip for the new weights.
Comment by cute_boi 4 days ago
Comment by collin 5 days ago
Just the math there... 150k TPM... and 15k TPS means... you can run for 10 seconds every minute?
The basic math boggles the mind.
Comment by msdz 4 days ago
It’s one order of magnitude less TPS, but still, that’s the limit with just one user…
Comment by baegi 5 days ago
Comment by nostrebored 5 days ago
Comment by fc417fc802 5 days ago
Comment by fc417fc802 5 days ago
Comment by RussianCow 5 days ago
Comment by collin 4 days ago
I was using it quite a while back, different model, different quotas, but for coding tasks it routinely hit quotas which made it quite difficult to actually use.
100s/min seems pretty poor actually with sub-agents etc.
Comment by ricardobeat 5 days ago
(note it's 150k uncached tokens, the total limit is 450k/min)
Comment by nostrebored 5 days ago
i don't think it's quite apples-to-apples to compare to a frontier model or even a k3. the odds of success (file compiles? read the right context?) are lower and thinking is longer.
Comment by conception 4 days ago
Comment by ricardobeat 4 days ago
Comment by lukewarm707 4 days ago
Comment by vidarh 4 days ago
Comment by gpugreg 5 days ago
For comparison, I ran the same task with DeepSeek-V4-Flash, which finished in 172 seconds and cost $0.024 with a final context window size of 55217 tokens, while Qwen3.8-27B was not even close to being done with a 64178 context window.
This is a very efficient way to burn your money, but I would not recommend it for programming.
On the positive side, I got a $5 signup bonus, so it wasn't my own money.
Comment by eveningtree 4 days ago
This doesn't work for my use case at all (code generation).
These bursts of speed might work well for workflows that need bursts of quick decisions, followed by silence. But these workflows have needed provable determinism to som extent, so I haven't been using llms for those use cases. And I don't see myself using llms for them in the future too.
Comment by 70rd 4 days ago
Comment by wongarsu 4 days ago
Comment by brookst 4 days ago
Comment by irthomasthomas 5 days ago
Comment by d2p 5 days ago
I'm confused. If it's 1500t/s, isn't that only 90k per minute? How do you hit a 450k/minute limit?
Comment by gpugreg 5 days ago
Comment by nullbio 4 days ago
Comment by perching_aix 5 days ago
Comment by selcuka 4 days ago
Comment by Pxtl 5 days ago
Comment by gabri200 4 days ago
Comment by jurgenburgen 4 days ago
Comment by codygman 4 days ago
Also make sure you use the instruct temperatures/etc for implementation.
Comment by pllbnk 5 days ago
Comment by lowbloodsugar 5 days ago
Comment by pllbnk 4 days ago
Comment by aizk 4 days ago
Comment by pllbnk 4 days ago
Comment by beastman82 5 days ago
Comment by jakswa 5 days ago
Comment by jasongill 5 days ago
They do appear to host other models on OpenRouter so maybe Qwen3.8 will be there soon: https://openrouter.ai/provider/cerebras
Comment by zackangelo 5 days ago
https://mixlayer.com, LAUNCH-Q38-27B gets you $5 in credits if you want to kick the tires.
Comment by danielklnstein 5 days ago
Comment by zackangelo 5 days ago
Comment by zackangelo 5 days ago
Comment by danielklnstein 5 days ago
Comment by zackangelo 5 days ago
The DFlash2 draft model we're using was trained on a lot of code, so if you use it in a coding agent you'll probably notice it run a lot faster (we've seen it break 300 tok/s).
Comment by danielklnstein 5 days ago
Comment by chrisboulton 5 days ago
Comment by RussianCow 5 days ago
Comment by egorfine 4 days ago
Comment by scratchyone 5 days ago
Comment by bookernath 5 days ago
Comment by eli 5 days ago
The Cerebras session cost me $1.60 and took a total of 5.1 mins. I did get a few brief 429 rate limit errors in there. The p50 speed was 890 tok/s and 0.64s TTFT.
Using OpenRouter averages, that would've cost $0.29 (no cache discount at Cerebras!) and would've taken about 14.4 minutes.
So on this one short session, cerebras was 5.6x more expensive in exchange for being 2.8x faster. Or, another way, $1.32 buys back about 9 minutes of your time. Not a bad trade IMHO but the cache situation is a real bummer. The longer your session the more relatively expensive Cerebras gets. The "good" news is you're also limited by its short context window.
(Also, I used to be on the Cerebras coding plan and the support is pretty bad for end users. My guess is these public endpoints are really just product demos for potential enterprise customers.)
Comment by irthomasthomas 5 days ago
Comment by eli 5 days ago
Comment by imtringued 4 days ago
There is nothing about their architecture that prevents reusing the KV cache other than the opportunity cost of keeping the memory occupied.
Comment by hexa00 5 days ago
The net effect is that I spend about the same time waiting, and I still need to read that output so, at least for coding, it actually reconciles me with the 100-200t/sec you can get on DS4 or the like. Maybe that's a good sweet spot after all and faster t/sec is not where the bottleneck is.
Also maybe my setup (OMP) doesn't do the cache correctly but that's a huge cost driver... so atm it's quite pricy
Comment by peri-cl 5 days ago
I don't believe Cerebras has a cached input pricing? They don't list one on the model page:
https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/qwen-3.8-27b
edit: See the sibling discussion,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49554520#49555094 ("Input tokens, whether served from the cache or processed fresh, are billed at the standard input token rate")
Comment by hexa00 5 days ago
I wonder if they will do that with sol ultrafast!
Comment by olivermuty 5 days ago
Comment by lostmsu 5 days ago
Comment by orbifold 4 days ago
Comment by lostmsu 4 days ago
Say avg model response length is 1024 tok. At 50 tok/s normal providers do your turn will only take 20s (vs Cerebras 101s) and will cost 20x less. That time and cost is per single tool call.
Comment by irthomasthomas 5 days ago
Comment by redman25 5 days ago
Comment by tandema 5 days ago
Comment by orbifold 4 days ago
Comment by nkhs89 5 days ago
Comment by gardnr 5 days ago
Edit: it looks like this is only available on a API token pricing. Does anyone know if they have rolled out prompt caching yet? It used to get pretty expensive for agentic coding tasks with no prompt caching.
Comment by jasongill 5 days ago
Comment by the_duke 5 days ago
Comment by jasongill 4 days ago
Comment by abtinf 5 days ago
> There is no additional fee for using prompt caching. Input tokens, whether served from the cache or processed fresh, are billed at the standard input token rate for the respective model.
Well, talk about flipping the narrative.
Comment by cute_boi 5 days ago
Comment by eli 5 days ago
Comment by singpolyma3 5 days ago
Comment by gardnr 5 days ago
Comment by altertable 5 days ago
Comment by dshat 5 days ago
Comment by foundfontic 5 days ago
Comment by londons_explore 5 days ago
Comment by threecheese 5 days ago
Comment by Zambyte 5 days ago
Comment by tacone 5 days ago
For those who haven't noticed though, the context size they allow for Qwen is just 128k. Still interesting as a specialized sub-agent but not really well suited for long tasks.
Comment by walrus01 4 days ago
Comment by imtringued 4 days ago
Comment by fulafel 4 days ago
I guess this smaller context but faster llm engine could be good to develop your harness on to get faster results and faster iteration.
Comment by walrus01 4 days ago
128k is pretty much only good for chat/conversational/question asking (including tool calls for searching things and spitting back/parsing a set of results) or human interactive agent purposes.
Comment by imtringued 4 days ago
You have to have a pretty inefficient use case for a subagent to think that 128k is not enough.
Comment by fulafel 4 days ago
I wonder what the approximate context window of a human programmer is... less than 12k lines I'm sure.
Comment by gilgoomesh 4 days ago
But that's before the prompt.
Then after the prompt, every tool call the agent makes adds to the context. Longer turns can easily consume 50k-100k tokens between the agent and various tool calls (reading the filesystem, reading files, reading compiler output, reading memories).
Then each "turn" with the agent stays in context and is fed into the next turn. Two or three turns and you're up near 250k.
Comment by imtringued 4 days ago
Comment by walrus01 4 days ago
Comment by srcreigh 5 days ago
When I put Qwen3.8 27B xhigh towards adding scope proxying to the Guice library, it one shotted a great impl using 250k context before stopping.
Part of the greatness of the model is that it just keeps going until it gets a great result. 128k context is disappointing.
Comment by freehorse 5 days ago
Comment by bitexploder 5 days ago
Comment by nicce 5 days ago
Comment by bitexploder 5 days ago
Comment by nicce 4 days ago
Comment by bitexploder 4 days ago
Comment by codazoda 5 days ago
https://joeldare.com/a-local-open-weight-model-builds-its-fi...
Comment by blaesus 4 days ago
Comment by freehorse 4 days ago
It is great UX when you are in a search results page, but I don't use it in the assistant directly because usually this kind of speed is less relevant there.
Comment by RomanPushkin 5 days ago
The next time I hear about them I am laughing, because when I could enjoy these powers? How many years I should be sitting in a waitlist...
Comment by latentsea 4 days ago
Comment by mncharity 4 days ago
Pfft, you can eat tokens far far faster than that. Many orders of magnitude more. Just switch from frontier-style bespoke artisanal pets to cloud burst-parallel, latent subspace exploring/exploiting/searching, mass ensembles of cow herds.
There's N-Version Programming. Work the problem in English, in Chinese, in Haskell, Lisp, Rust, etc. Then work ports to the target lang.
There's design space sampling. Work the problem emphasizing performance, or security, or monitoring, readability, etc. Then work a synthesis.
There's non-determinism sampling. Work the problem order 10 or 100 times. Then work to combine the best bits from each.
There's sample synthesis. NP-hard aggregation of insights.
There's genetic exploration. Work populations of trees of work variants under selective pressure.
There's repo quantum superpositions of implementation space. The unspecified remains indeterminate - state space collapse occurs not upon each edit/commit, but as JIT-synthesized fuzzing/search upon each execution.
There's maintaining a pretty dev UI, but that >>10k tok/s is trivial, because like symbiotic adversary cocreation, fine-grain agent swarms, scenario analysis/forecasting, etc, etc, it is unlike the preceding items... which scale combinatorially.
"All you need is 1500 t/s"? "All you need is 640k RAM" is only 5 orders of magnitude off from 64 GB. It takes "All you need is a single Intel 3101's 64 bits", to get 9 orders of magnitude from 64 GB. Then datacenters...
Comment by gilgoomesh 4 days ago
Better download some more RAM.
Comment by kilroy123 4 days ago
Comment by orliesaurus 5 days ago
Comment by anthonypasq 5 days ago
Comment by kroaton 5 days ago
Comment by lsb 2 days ago
Comment by apatheticonion 4 days ago
Think, DeepSeek Flash (before the price hikes) prices.
If I can run this on a 32gb card while they have a datacenter with wholesale electricity prices, why are we not seeing "cents per billion tokens" pricing?
Comment by mrngld 4 days ago
If you want to spend a new car worth of money and still not serve as fast as Cerebras because you can't simply buy their mammoth custom chips, then yes you too can self host a huge Deepseek or GLM model.
Comment by apatheticonion 2 days ago
Comment by gabri200 4 days ago
Comment by iamleppert 4 days ago
Borderline fraudulent to advertise to developers when it's completely impractical to use. Their only support is their company Slack channel.
Comment by ecshafer 5 days ago
Comment by FeepingCreature 5 days ago
Comment by codazoda 5 days ago
Yesterday I did have success with Gemma-4-12b with 128k context. It fits in my RAM and it's relatively fast on my hardware.
I had to give it prompts that are quite a bit different from the way I use foundation models, but I did get it to work quite well. I feel like I could learn it's differences and get good at using it for real work.
Comment by apitman 4 days ago
Comment by pyrolistical 5 days ago
This model had its knowledge replaced with reasoning ability. The chain of thought what makes this reasoning effective.
So this is why you need to let it think and don’t quantize the kv cache.
Comment by FeepingCreature 4 days ago
Comment by hedgehog 4 days ago
Comment by Almondsetat 4 days ago
Comment by grav 5 days ago
Comment by irthomasthomas 5 days ago
Comment by Roark66 4 days ago
What do people use these tiny limits for?
I started measuring my Claude Max x5 use and last week (they gave me 50% more) I used 1.3B input tokens. Some 130M were cache writes, rest was cached. And 5M output.
This puts things in perspective. We're taking thousands of bucks weekly even if I managed to switch to Kimi K3.
What is the majority of this use? Infrastructure upgrades, troubleshooting and so on. Ingesting quite a bit of documentation at beginning of each session.
Sessions run from few hours to a month long and 1M context usually hovers near 30-60%.
Comment by peri-cl 5 days ago
(update: I got my answer. support@ replied and said my email domain is on their blacklist. It was just me (and I've resolved it)).
Comment by bakies 5 days ago
Comment by porphyra 5 days ago
Comment by gardnr 5 days ago
The CEO was on Gradient Dissent a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNXebAQ6igs
Comment by codexon 5 days ago
Comment by porphyra 5 days ago
[1] https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/accelerating-gpt-5-6-sol-ultraf...
Comment by codexon 5 days ago
It would look bad for cerebras if other people are hosting the 27b version and show a higher TPS than cerebras.
Comment by minimaltom 5 days ago
Comment by altertable 5 days ago
Comment by codazoda 5 days ago
EDIT: Or, maybe it's just token pricing, but $10 is the minimum? Maybe it's that.
Comment by low_tech_punk 5 days ago
There is a separate subscription based plan, which is sold out now.
Comment by codazoda 5 days ago
Comment by ma2kx 5 days ago
Comment by low_tech_punk 4 days ago
Comment by the_duke 5 days ago
Sure, 4x input , but cheaper output. Though Cerebras doesn't have prompt caching, so not great for agentic workloads. (they do, but it doesn't affect the price.
Comment by srcreigh 5 days ago
Most of the cost for agentic coding is input tokens, you pay for the whole context at each tool call or message. Output tokens is just a small rate
Comment by register 4 days ago
Comment by laweijfmvo 4 days ago
Comment by darkbatman 5 days ago
Comment by polygot 5 days ago
Comment by vb-8448 5 days ago
Comment by yipinwong 5 days ago
Having the choice is good as you can make a trade-off between speed, perf, and quality.
Until last year, people had a single AI god they believed in (mostly Anthropic stuff). Now we have power to make choices (open-weights, SOTA, speed-optimized, etc) the same way you do for system designs.
Comment by vb-8448 5 days ago
But I burn my 5$ allowance in 10 minutes ... and only because I was hitting rate limits, without it would probably be less than a minute.
Comment by yipinwong 5 days ago
Comment by storch 4 days ago
Comment by walrus01 4 days ago
Paying for external inference for a much larger model like qwen 3.8-flash-next Q8 with full context makes a lot more sense, since the model consumes something like 188GB RAM when fully loaded into an inference engine.
Yeah I guess this is cool and all that it runs at some ridiculous token/s rate but if the actual usage of it is highly limited... What's the point? I'd rather have a much slower tok/s rate that can chew on things 24x7.
Comment by Marciplan 5 days ago
Hope they add such models to Code too :)
Comment by altertable 5 days ago
Comment by fulafel 5 days ago
Comment by explorigin 4 days ago
Comment by naklitechie 4 days ago
Comment by srcreigh 5 days ago
Comment by karim79 5 days ago
Comment by mrngld 4 days ago
Well, cars only got better.
We're going to be talking about how to leverage this new tool for many years to come.
Comment by khalic 4 days ago
Comment by dev0p 4 days ago
It's something that's been bugging me for a while: once we reach a "good enough" small model, and qwen 3.8 27b is already getting damn close to it, does it make sense to just bake weights and everything directly into an ASIC, and use that for highly optimized inference? AFAIK only groq and cerebras are moving in that direction, and only to be providers themselves... It would be a dream to buy one for <$1k.
Comment by nrub 4 days ago
Comment by drchaim 5 days ago
Comment by forlorn 4 days ago
Comment by WithinReason 4 days ago
Comment by trvz 5 days ago
Psychopaths: tok/SEC
Comment by altertable 5 days ago
Comment by scotty79 5 days ago
Comment by verdverm 5 days ago
Comment by actionfromafar 4 days ago
Comment by onesandofgrain 4 days ago
Comment by TawResearch 4 days ago
Comment by jing09928 5 days ago
Comment by alescalaios 4 days ago
Comment by byako 5 days ago
Comment by miohtama 5 days ago
Comment by qiine 5 days ago
Comment by davrosthedalek 5 days ago
Comment by dgellow 5 days ago
Still, 1500tokens/s is indeed wild
Comment by ripbozo 5 days ago
Comment by eli 5 days ago
Comment by howunfortunate 5 days ago
Comment by Zambyte 5 days ago