Qwen 3.8 27B available on Cerebras at 1500 tokens/s
258 points by altertable 2 hours ago | 84 comments

nostrebored 57 minutes ago
150k TPM limit on public endpoint means that it's likely unusable for many coding tasks. When we've tried Cerebras in the past, our problem has always been rates. We'd love to not deal with dedicated and to have access to a more flexible rate pool.

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.

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olivermuty 52 minutes ago
Cerebras the tech is awesome, cerebras the company is a trainwreck
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0xbadcafebee 6 minutes ago
[delayed]
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jasongill 2 hours ago
It would be great if they made their inference capacity for this model available via OpenRouter; the fastest provider on OpenRouter right now is at ~80tps https://openrouter.ai/qwen/qwen3.8-27b#providers

They do appear to host other models on OpenRouter so maybe Qwen3.8 will be there soon: https://openrouter.ai/provider/cerebras

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zackangelo 2 hours ago
We're serving it around 150-200tok/s (uses our new speculative decoding implementation on a DFlash2 draft model).

https://mixlayer.com, LAUNCH-Q38-27B gets you $5 in credits if you want to kick the tires.

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danielklnstein 57 minutes ago
I tried in your playground and got 14.2 tok/s?
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zackangelo 12 minutes ago
just added 8 more H200s to the cluster, if you (or anyone else) runs into issues please feel free to drop me a message: zack at mixlayer.com
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danielklnstein 14 seconds ago
Works much better now! Got 103.9 tok/s, not quite 200 - but still amazing! Thanks for sharing
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zackangelo 53 minutes ago
apologies we just got a sudden burst of new users and traffic, it's scaling up now.
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bookernath 44 minutes ago
This feels great
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gpugreg 52 minutes ago
I was wondering whether this was any good for programming, but it is too fast for its own good. There is a limit of 450,000 tokens per minute. I hit this limit in about 90 seconds and burned through $1.10 while doing so. This is because cached tokens count towards the token limit.

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.

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d2p 46 minutes ago
> There is a limit of 450,000 tokens per minute. I hit this limit in about 90 seconds

I'm confused. If it's 1500t/s, isn't that only 90k per minute? How do you hit a 450k/minute limit?

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gpugreg 35 minutes ago
Cached tokens count towards the limit as well. For example, if your context window is 50,000 tokens, it takes 9 requests to reach that limit without generating a single token.
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Pxtl 10 minutes ago
Could this also be coming from the problem that Qwen3.8-27B's default mode being "extra-high reasoning level"?
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hexa00 2 hours ago
Just tried it on a medium size coding/debug problem on an existing codebase, observations: - Input doesn't look faster than other models, it spends a lot of time reading Read about 5M tokens - Output is awesome, super fast as you expect from the 1500t/sec I think that's correct - Tool call is failing more than say DS4, which leads to time wasted on retries (complex tools like browser control for example) - Shell commands are still somewhat of a bottleneck

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

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peri-cl 58 minutes ago
> "Also maybe my setup (OMP) doesn't do the cache correctly but that's a huge cost driver... so atm it's quite pricy"

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")

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hexa00 45 minutes ago
lol yeah just saw that, yeah that makes it unusable I think at least for me.

I wonder if they will do that with sol ultrafast!

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olivermuty 52 minutes ago
They have cache, but it costs the same indeed, no idea what the point of the cache is
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lostmsu 49 minutes ago
They don't have cache (e.g. KV cache). But they write down what you sent earlier to say they cached it! To still bill the same as uncached later (because they didn't actually cache it)!
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irthomasthomas 28 minutes ago
I can't believe this situation has not improved in years. Is cerebras' main business selling the hardware, then?
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redman25 13 minutes ago
Maybe they’re gunning for speedy non-interactive pricing? Or its a limit of the technology or a business decision?
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nkhs89 42 minutes ago
[dead]
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pllbnk 2 hours ago
Just a couple days ago I learned about ninfer (https://github.com/Neroued/ninfer) and on RTX 5090 I can now get ~200 tok/s and over 400 tok/s on concurrent requests which is plenty fast for a local model of this strength.
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beastman82 54 minutes ago
can't second ninfer enough. amazing tech
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gardnr 2 hours ago
I used their Coding Plan for a few months. It is genuinely difficult to keep up with the models. The output is so fast. Qwen 3.8 27B is likely one of the strongest models they've hosted so far.

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.

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jasongill 2 hours ago
It appears that they do support Prompt Caching: https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/capabilities/prompt-cachi...
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the_duke 2 hours ago
It doesn't reduce the price though.
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abtinf 2 hours ago
> How are cached tokens priced?

> 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.

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Barbing 2 hours ago
heh

Is there a speed increase or is that purely marketing spin on “we might cache on our end but no discount for you”?

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lostmsu 47 minutes ago
Pure marketing.
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eli 2 hours ago
Strongest model that they host on the public endpoint. They do a super fast version of GPT 5.6 Sol for OpenAI and have bigger open models on dedicated endpoints.
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altertable 2 hours ago
Agreed, but in our SAAS I can tell some UX will sky-rocket to next level with this
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singpolyma3 2 hours ago
The coding plan is gone now right?
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gardnr 2 hours ago
Last time I got one, I had to log into a Discord server and wait for "the drop" and IIRC Daniel Kim was giving them out based on who was there at the time. They were gone in less than a minute. This was ~8 months ago.
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cute_boi 2 hours ago
i believe they used to have monthly plan, what happened to that?
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eli 39 minutes ago
I just did a little anecdotal test. Had pi + cerebras review a recent commit and asked a few quick followups on it. Worked great.

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.)

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irthomasthomas 36 minutes ago
Thanks! Is there something about their platform that prevents caching? Or are they just not passing on the discount?
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eli 25 minutes ago
The session had a 91.4% cache hit rate. They just give zero discount.
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tacone 2 hours ago
Noticed they are present in OpenRouter, but Qwen 3.8 is not there yet. Hopefully it'll get there soon.

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.

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srcreigh 60 minutes ago
Great observation. That’s not enough context even for some one shot xhigh requests.

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.

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foundfontic 2 hours ago
I really wish they had their customer support somewhere else than Discord, which seems to think I'm a bot and doesen't accept my email or phone numbe
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londons_explore 2 hours ago
discord support can fix such issues
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threecheese 2 hours ago
If you need customer support to access customer support, something is wrong; no?
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Zambyte 52 minutes ago
Discord is simply a liability.
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ecshafer 22 minutes ago
I have a self hosted Qwen 3.8 27B and I find it to be unusably bad. Using it agentically, it will spin around in circles on even small tasks talking to itself until it loses context and starts again. I even had it say "I've forgotten the users initial question"
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FeepingCreature 18 minutes ago
I have a self hosted Qwen 3.8 27B and I find it unbelievably cracked and dedicated. It's at least credibly attempted everything I've thrown at it. Just today I had it write a toy compiler with a JIT backend just to test out a concept, and that was with 4-bit quantization and 8-bit KV cache. Something has to be going wrong with your deployment.
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orliesaurus 32 minutes ago
Qwen 3.8 27B is an exceptional model for coding and ranks as one of the best local models for coding....BUT in my head I am confused why a company that's IPO'd doesn't invest in RL'd super specialized, super-damn-fast models for very specific tasks - instead of giving us the OSS GPT model from what feels like 200 years ago
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byako 2 hours ago
1500 tok/s is wild. meanwhile my brain does like 2 tokens per minute and half of them are 'uh'. we have truly reached the singularity
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miohtama 2 hours ago
Your brain can wash laundry and cook pasta, so there is still a long way to go
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qiine 2 hours ago
(requires additional fleshy bits sold separately)
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davrosthedalek 15 minutes ago
regarding my brain, my mother might disagree on the laundry part.
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dgellow 2 hours ago
Your brain updates itself constantly and maintains your whole body, LLMs are static.

Still, 1500tokens/s is indeed wild

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eli 2 hours ago
If you read the reasoning trace for Qwen 3.8, it does a whole lot of "uh" and "But, wait..." too
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howunfortunate 2 hours ago
You're absolutely right - filler words are genuinely load-bearing
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Zambyte 53 minutes ago
At 1500 tps, "uh" is about 0.7 ms, instead of 200-300 ms for a human.
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ripbozo 46 minutes ago
fyi this is an AI bot account
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grav 31 minutes ago
Should be available in OpenCode once this lands: https://github.com/anomalyco/models.dev/pull/6199/changes
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irthomasthomas 25 minutes ago
It's going to cost a fortune in opencode without prompt caching.
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dshat 2 hours ago
I'm saddened that Gemma4 is replaced by Qwen 3.8 on PayGo plan. Gemma4 31B is not coding model but it is excellent at intent understanding and task execution used in agentic software. This just shows that real world dominant usage for llms so far is to code generate. And not to augment business products. They must had barely anyone using Gemma to remove it from that tier.
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freehorse 2 hours ago
I have used their gemma 4 31b model through kagi and getting real instantaneous answers is absolutely crazy. A very different feeling and UX. Even if the model is smaller, there is definitely a use case for these. I was wondering if they would put the qwen 27b model, it sounds very interesting to try.
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bitexploder 58 minutes ago
The thing I didn’t realize for a while is 27B is rather smart. As many (or more) activated parameters as the flash models of the universe that we know about. It reasons very well. It just doesn’t have a lot of knowledge.
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peri-cl 2 hours ago
(Was anyone able to create an account just now? I tried but onboarding falls into a redirect loop)

(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)).

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bakies 2 hours ago
yeah - used sign in with google
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porphyra 2 hours ago
Why do they only host small models rather than the 2.4T version? Is the I/O and interconnect between the wafers bad due to the limited beachfront relative to the massive size of the chip?
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gardnr 2 hours ago
They make a giant inference chip. Their inference service is basically just advertising for their core value prop: hardware.

The CEO was on Gradient Dissent a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNXebAQ6igs

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codexon 2 hours ago
The wafer only has space for 44 gb of sram. If they offload ram they lose the speedup of having everything on 1 chip (the whole point of cerebras).
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porphyra 2 hours ago
They can host larger models by pipelining it on multiple wafers. Each wafer stores one layer and N layers can serve an N * 44 gb model with N concurrency. The limitation would of course be inter-wafer I/O, which my comment was getting at. That's probably how they can serve bigger models like GPT 5.6 Sol [1].

[1] https://www.cerebras.ai/blog/accelerating-gpt-5-6-sol-ultraf...

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codexon 2 hours ago
I never said offloading was impossible. It will result in a large slowdown.

It would look bad for cerebras if other people are hosting the 27b version and show a higher TPS than cerebras.

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minimaltom 53 minutes ago
[dead]
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altertable 2 hours ago
Mostly economics I'm sure
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the_duke 2 hours ago
Funnily enough the pricing isn't that much worse than on openrouter, where the best price at the moment is $0.24 in / $2.55 out, vs $1 / $1.5 on Cerebras.

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.

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srcreigh 53 minutes ago
It is 15x more expensive. Openrouter usually charges like 1/4 for cached input.

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

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darkbatman 2 hours ago
I have been their user for more than year even used coding plans, though for normal coding the quota will definitely be a blocker if you are using opencode because rpm are bit less. Good for products/api though.
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srcreigh 48 minutes ago
How many years until chips like this are available to consumers?
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nicce 30 minutes ago
Many. Too lucrative for certain companies and even governments to allow that to happen
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polygot 2 hours ago
Ut oh, might be down: "Unable to connect to the server. Please check your connection and try again." when sending a message to Qwen 3.8 27B.
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vb-8448 2 hours ago
At that speed it's too pricey for agentinc tasks.
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yipinwong 2 hours ago
The target audience is who needs raw speed.

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.

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vb-8448 51 minutes ago
It's not a criticism, I was really looking forward to trying out such a powerful model at this speed.

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.

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fulafel 2 hours ago
What are the best benchmarks/leaderboards that compare task completion time between provider+model combos?
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drchaim 2 hours ago
The idea of custom software on the fly is coming
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Marciplan 2 hours ago
used their Code product with GLM4.7. its fun but if the model is bad it just doesn’t do much useful.

Hope they add such models to Code too :)

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altertable 2 hours ago
Yeah GLM 4.7 is from another decade at the speed we're going
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trvz 2 hours ago
Normal people: tok/s or t/s

Psychopaths: tok/SEC

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altertable 2 hours ago
ok fair, caps lock kept ON /o\
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scotty79 2 hours ago
I like tps
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verdverm 2 hours ago
do you get reports on them?
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