meta:
  title: "Qwen3.5-9B"
  slug: "qwen3.5-9b"
  provider: "Qwen"
  description: "Qwen3.5 dense multimodal model (9B) with gated delta networks hybrid attention, MTP, and 262K context"
  date_added: 2026-04-22
  date_updated: 2026-09-14
  difficulty: beginner
  tasks:
    - multimodal
    - text
  performance_headline: "Single-GPU Qwen3.5 dense with MTP-accelerated decoding"
  related_recipes:
    - "Qwen/Qwen3.5-27B"
    - "Qwen/Qwen3.5-4B"
  hardware:
    arc_pro_b60: verified
    arc_pro_b70: verified

model:
  model_id: "Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B"
  min_vllm_version: "0.17.0"
  default_frontend: rust
  architecture: dense
  parameter_count: "9B"
  active_parameters: "9B"
  context_length: 262144
  base_args:
    - "--trust-remote-code"
  base_env: {}

features:
  tool_calling:
    description: "Enable automatic tool choice with Qwen3 Coder parser"
    args:
      - "--enable-auto-tool-choice"
      - "--tool-call-parser"
      - "qwen3_coder"
  reasoning:
    description: "Enable chain-of-thought reasoning with Qwen3 parser"
    args:
      - "--reasoning-parser"
      - "qwen3"
  spec_decoding:
    description: "Multi-token prediction speculative decoding for lower latency"
    args:
      - "--speculative-config"
      - '{"method":"mtp","num_speculative_tokens":1}'
  text_only:
    description: "Skip loading the vision encoder for text-only workloads — frees VRAM for KV cache."
    args:
      - "--language-model-only"
  long_context:
    description: "YaRN RoPE scaling past the native 262,144-token window to ~1,010,000 tokens. Static YaRN holds the scaling factor constant regardless of input length, so leave this off unless you actually serve long prompts; for ~524K, halve the factor to 2.0."
    args:
      - "--hf-overrides"
      - '{"text_config": {"rope_parameters": {"mrope_interleaved": true, "mrope_section": [11, 11, 10], "rope_type": "yarn", "rope_theta": 10000000, "partial_rotary_factor": 0.25, "factor": 4.0, "original_max_position_embeddings": 262144}}}'
      - "--max-model-len"
      - "1010000"
    env:
      VLLM_ALLOW_LONG_MAX_MODEL_LEN: "1"

opt_in_features:
  - spec_decoding
  - text_only
  - long_context

variants:
  default:
    precision: bf16
    vram_minimum_gb: 22
    description: "Full precision BF16 — single 24 GB GPU or Intel Arc Pro B60/B70"

  fp8:
    model_id: "RedHatAI/Qwen3.5-9B-FP8-dynamic"
    precision: fp8
    vram_minimum_gb: 11
    description: "RedHatAI FP8 (E4M3) with dynamic per-token activation quantization"
    extra_args:
      - "--kv-cache-dtype"
      - "fp8"

compatible_strategies:
  - single_node_tp
  - multi_node_tp

hardware_overrides:
  xpu:
    extra_args:
      - "--enforce-eager"

strategy_overrides: {}

guide: |
  ## Overview

  [Qwen3.5-9B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B) is a dense multimodal
  model from the Qwen3.5 family — same gated delta networks hybrid attention,
  vision encoder, 262K context, and MTP support as its larger siblings, but
  sized to fit comfortably on a single 24 GB GPU.

  ## Prerequisites

  - **vLLM version:** >= 0.17.0
  - **Hardware:** single 24 GB GPU (RTX 4090 / L4 / A10G / H100) or Intel Arc Pro B60/B70

  ### Install vLLM

  ```bash
  uv venv
  source .venv/bin/activate
  uv pip install -U vllm --torch-backend=auto
  ```

  ### Docker
  ```bash
  docker pull vllm/vllm-openai-xpu:latest  # Intel XPU (B60 / B70)
  ```

  ## Launching the Server

  ### Single-GPU BF16

  ```bash
  vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B \
    --max-model-len 262144 \
    --reasoning-parser qwen3
  ```

  ### MTP speculative decoding

  ```bash
  vllm serve Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B \
    --speculative-config '{"method": "mtp", "num_speculative_tokens": 1}' \
    --reasoning-parser qwen3
  ```

  ### Docker (Intel XPU B60 / B70)

  Validated on 1× Intel Arc Pro B60 / B70 (B60 24 GB, B70 32 GB per card) with the
  official vLLM XPU image `vllm/vllm-openai-xpu:latest`.
  
  ```bash
  docker run --device /dev/dri \
    -v /dev/dri/by-path:/dev/dri/by-path --shm-size=16g \
    --privileged --ipc=host -p 8000:8000 \
    -v ~/.cache/huggingface:/root/.cache/huggingface \
    vllm/vllm-openai-xpu:latest \
    Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B \
    --reasoning-parser qwen3 \
    --max-model-len 8192 \
    --enforce-eager
  ```

  ## Client Usage

  ```python
  from openai import OpenAI

  client = OpenAI(api_key="EMPTY", base_url="http://localhost:8000/v1")
  resp = client.chat.completions.create(
      model="Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B",
      messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Hello!"}],
      max_tokens=128,
  )
  print(resp.choices[0].message.content)
  ```

  ## Troubleshooting

  - **CUDA graph / Mamba cache size error:** reduce `--max-cudagraph-capture-size`
    (default 512). See [vLLM PR #34571](https://github.com/vllm-project/vllm/pull/34571).
  - **Disable reasoning:** add `--default-chat-template-kwargs '{"enable_thinking": false}'`.

  ## References

  - [Model card](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B)
  - [Base checkpoint](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-9B-Base)