#backend-comparison

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Instruct-2507 (INT4, OpenVINO IR) served via OpenVINO Model Server 2026.2.1 on Jitori's Intel Arc Pro B60 (Battlemage BMG G21, 24GB). Generates at 67.95 tok/s via the OpenAI streaming API - roughly 1.76x faster than the same B60 running Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B Q4_K_M via llama.cpp Vulkan (bm-001, 38.6 tok/s). This is the backend comparison the dataset was missing: same GPU, same 30B-A3B model class, two Intel-GPU backends. Finding: OpenVINO is meaningfully faster than Vulkan on Battlemage for this workload. This also corrects a fleet assumption - OpenVINO's GPU plugin (Level Zero) works cleanly on this B60, contradicting the older 'SYCL is broken on Battlemage, Vulkan-only' note.

On a single Radeon AI PRO R9700 (gfx1201, RDNA4), llama.cpp Vulkan with the MTP speculative-decoding head is the only path that activates Qwen3.6's Multi-Token Prediction — delivering 66 tok/s, roughly 2.5x the 27 tok/s class of every other backend. If you don't load the -mtp.gguf draft head, Vulkan, HIP, and Ollama all land within a narrow 26-32 tok/s band and the architecture's main speed advantage is left on the table.

For the Ornith-1.0-35B MoE model (qwen35moe family) on a single Radeon AI PRO R9700, Ollama is the clear winner at 78.3 tok/s - roughly 2.9x faster than llama.cpp Vulkan (27.3 tok/s), which also spilled past the 32GB VRAM limit into system RAM. The HIP backend failed outright: it could not parse the Ornith GGUF (version mismatch). On MoE models without an MTP head, Ollama's expert routing currently beats hand-tuned llama.cpp on this build.