Qwen3-8B — fni8 (int8/W4A8 dp4a, Volta sm_70)
dense Qwen3 model, quantized from Qwen/Qwen3-8B. Repackaged to the .fni8 resident format (~8.8 GB) for the fni8 W8A8/W4A8 DP4A kernels on NVIDIA Volta (sm_70) — Tesla V100 / CMP 100-210.
Status
Validated: int8 GPU decode confirmed via fni8-serve (see the runtime's models/COVERAGE.md). Performance is fleet-specific. All fni8 speedups are measured on the CMP 100-210 mining-card fleet, where the fp16 tensor cores are firmware-gimped. These numbers do not transfer to a real Tesla V100 (whose fp16 tensor cores would beat dp4a).
Format
- Weights: int8 per-row (W8A8), fp32 scales, in the resident dp4a VRAM layout (loads with no dequant/repack).
- Why dp4a: sm_70 has no int8 tensor cores, so the matmul contraction runs on the
__dp4aCUDA-core intrinsic. On the CMP 100-210 fleet (whose fp16 tensor cores are firmware-limited) dp4a is the fast path, not a compromise.
How to run
fni8-serve is the LLM runtime (load_fni8_state_dict(<file>) into an LLMEngine; the architecture is read from the file). ComfyUI-fni8 is for diffusion DiTs only and does not load this model.
Limitations
- Quantization is lossy: int8 (and especially int4) outputs differ from the fp16/bf16 parent, and the difference varies by task.
- Capabilities, biases, and risks of the parent model carry over — see the parent card.
- This is a derivative quantization, not a relicense; the parent model's license and acceptable uses apply.
Part of the fni8 stack: kernels · LLM serving · ComfyUI DiTs.