# frank-archon — Radiance (StillDeadcode), publisher Qwen3.8-Flash-Next iq4r, 2× R9700 TP=2

**Status: LIVE — deployed 2026-10-15.** · **Host:** Dankserver (192.168.0.235) · **Port:** 7770 · **GPU:** 2× Radeon AI PRO R9700 (gfx1201), TP=2

The in-house w4dn8 conversion of the Swift1.5 finetune
([[frank-archon-radiance-swift15-w4dn8]]) is replaced by the **engine
author's published container**:
[`StillDeadcode/qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe`](https://huggingface.co/StillDeadcode/qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe)
— the official `Qwen/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next` bf16 checkpoint rad-converted by
StillDeadcode. Same port, alias, container name, systemd unit, digest-pinned
engine pin **1.0.13** (`stilldeadcode/radiance@sha256:4c3f484564…`), and
**every serving argument carried verbatim** from the 2026-10-13 shape.
Rollback: revert the swap commit — the w4dn8 `.rad` stays on disk.

## The payload

`qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe.rad` — **121,969,901,568 B = 116,322 MiB**,
sha256 `0af5e96244e80c21ac8edca1719dae49b8a201b94a2f3994c3e24026ceaa4d20`
(Hub LFS oid), fetched byte-exact by `scripts/download-frank-archon-iq4r.sh`
(hfget resume + size + sha256; staging dir
`/home/dank/models/StillDeadcode/qwen3.8-next-flash-fp8-iq4r-moe/` keeps the
card, LICENSE, and recipe `qwen4exp-w4nl64-i8-hc8m` as provenance).

| Plane | Encoding (publisher recipe `qwen4exp-w4nl64-i8-hc8m`) |
| --- | --- |
| Routed experts | 4-bit codes into a 16-level **non-uniform** codebook after a 128-point Walsh–Hadamard rotation, one E4M3 scale per 64 weights; codes by GPTQ (10M-token calibration, per-expert down-proj Hessians) + 3 coordinate-descent sweeps |
| Protected experts | **ten** per layer, whole-expert bf16 (down-projection energy) |
| Trunk + lm_head | int8 W8A8, scale per 128 columns searched; HC mixtures E4M3 |
| PLE n-gram | fp8 fixed-scale, in-container (served `--ngram-placement ram`, same 47.7 GiB pin law) |
| Speculator | the model's own MTP head (card default depth 3; served at 2) |
| Vision | bf16 vision tower, in-container |

**Base model: the OFFICIAL (censored) Qwen3.8-Flash-Next** — the fleet's
only frontier model at base alignment; the abliterated family lives on
frank-dragoon. Card quality: full-vocab teacher-forced KL vs bf16 over
~75K positions — mean 0.0789 all-tokens / 0.0239 assistant turns, top-1
agreement 92.85 %.

## Why this swap

- **Publisher-graded precision**: the w4nl codebook + coordinate-descent
  refinement is the engine author's own quality ceiling for this
  checkpoint; the card's KL ladder (p99 1.65, p99.9 5.33) is published and
  reproducible, where our w4dn8 gate measured against our own reference.
- **Formal parity**: the served file is the one the engine author supports
  — decode/prefill behavior on 1.0.13 is their tested path (the card's run
  line speaks the 1.0.13-era flags; the `--vram-weights-mib`/`--vram-kv-mib`
  pair we ship is accepted by pin 1.0.13 per the 2026-10-06 A/B, so the
  shape needed no translation).
- **Cost**: the Swift1.5 finetune's refusal-bending behavior leaves this
  endpoint (it returns to the official base alignment); the 4-slot/200k
  economics and all shape laws carry over unchanged.

## Shape (unchanged from 2026-10-13)

All of it, verbatim — the payload moved 116,416 → 116,322 MiB, inside the
same budget:

- `--tp 2 --tp-wire wht6`, `--max-num-seqs 3`, `--max-model-len 200000`
  (capacity contract 3 × 200,000), `--kv-cache-dtype fp8`
- `--placement expert_tiered --host-pool-mib 44928` + explicit
  `--vram-weights-mib 25600 --vram-kv-mib 5120` (30,720 of the engine's
  30,969 MiB ceiling; pool = contract + 1.3 %)
- `--num-speculative-tokens 2`, `--max-num-batched-tokens 2048`
  (MNBT 2048 law), prefix cache 8 GiB host + 64 GiB disk,
  `--ngram-placement ram`, froggeric v22.5 `--override-chat-template`
- TTM preflight floor 150,000 / target 204,800 MiB; pinned ledger
  2 × 44 GiB pool + 47.7 GiB PLE + 8 GiB prefix ≈ 147 GiB (see
  [[frank-archon-radiance-swift15-w4dn8]] for the ledger arithmetic and
  the KV dtype law — both are engine properties, payload-independent)

The publisher's card run line (`--host-pool-mib 12288`,
`--expert-vs-cache-ratio 0.82`, seqs 8, spec 3, ~32 GB host RAM) is their
shape on stock 32 GB cards; the fleet ships its own measured shape against
the same file.

## Cutover record — 2026-10-15

1. `rm` (Frank's one-time authorization): the raw
   `ukisai/Swift1.5-Qwen3.8-Flash-Next` BF16 checkpoint (336 GiB, spent
   conversion source) and `qwen4exp-fp8-native.rad` (173 GiB, two eras
   back) left `/home/dank/models` — 150 GB free → 658 GB free. The fp8-native
   payload is **no longer on disk**: rebuild =
   `scripts/download-frank-archon.sh` + `scripts/build-frank-archon-rad.sh`.
2. Fetch: `scripts/download-frank-archon-iq4r.sh --fetch` as transient unit
   `iq4r-fetch` (detached-job protocol; log
   `/home/dank/logs/iq4r-fetch.log`, rc sentinel `…rc`).
3. Deploy: `scripts/deploy.sh dankserver --service frank-archon` — launched
   detached (the swap restarts the very endpoint the operator session runs
   on; the harness timeout catches the session on return).
4. **Boot ledger (fill after first boot)**: `weights/kv` per-rank budgets,
   `kv_attn` page size, slab slot count, `backs N sequences` line, sampler
   rows, unclaimed MiB. The load of this file on pin 1.0.13 is the gate: a
   refusal naming the w4nl codebook means the pin predates the encoding —
   the documented repair is the pin bump to the card's era, which the
   2026-10-06 1.2.0 A/B (decode 29.21 vs 30.08 t/s, acceptance 0.7123 vs
   0.7549) makes a paid decision.
5. **Post-boot measurements (pending)**: decode ladder (99.0 t/s single
   @ 43.5k, 93.3 @ 197k, 3-way 113.9/43.3/10.9 = 18.4 t/s aggregate —
   these are the **w4dn8** numbers, the record to beat, not this file's),
   slab-limited prefill (22208/3,397 → 25600/3,584 t/s A-cold 43.5k), draft
   acceptance, and `scripts/probe-frank-archon-kv.py` leg D.

## Rollback

Revert the swap commit (`scripts/frank-archon.env` MODEL_FILE line) +
redeploy: `/home/dank/models/rad/qwen4exp-swift15-w4dn8-i8-hc8m.rad`
(116,416 MiB) stays on disk, KLD-gated, same shape. The fp8-native era is
rebuild-only (see the cutover record). The w4dn8 runbook keeps every shape
law, the KV dtype table, the slab ladder, and the tuning levers:
[[frank-archon-radiance-swift15-w4dn8]].

## Related

- [[frank-archon-radiance-swift15-w4dn8]] — the replaced payload and the
  full shape-law library (slab slope, KV dtype arithmetic, TTM law)
- [[frank-archon-radiance-qwen38-native-fp8]] — the fp8-native era
  (rebuild-only now; owns the descriptor-selection law)
- [[Dual-R9700-Cooperation]] — the board swap that made TP=2 legal here
- [[deployment]] — the service-scoped deploy this cutover rides