Q6 saved space; predicted MOS did not settle naturalness

Q6 and Q8 quantized the same 651 main matrices and 37 external tokenizer matrices in execution. Unsupported tensors stayed FP32. The Q6 checkpoint was produced directly from the original FP32 source.

A smaller multilingual checkpoint

Q6 and Q8 quantized the same 651 main matrices and 37 external tokenizer matrices in execution. Unsupported tensors stayed FP32. The Q6 checkpoint was produced directly from the original FP32 source.

Main files were about 2,711 MB for FP32, 878 for Q8 and 718 for Q6. Observed process RSS peaks were 3.226, 1.521 and 1.372 GiB. Across the six-prompt, two-seed corpus, aggregate RTF was 1.386, 0.740 and 0.705 respectively.

What the quality proxies could say

Strict ASR edits were 11/150 for FP32, 10/150 for Q8 and 13/150 for Q6. English predicted MOS differed by just +0.0036 for Q6 versus Q8, with a phrase-bootstrap interval spanning zero. Pitch range and within-clip variation were measured, but they do not establish which model sounds more natural.

An operational choice with limits

Q8 remained the preferred default, supported by the small intelligibility observation and user preference. Q6 offered a real storage reduction. Neither result proves a general perceptual winner, and the sampled chip-energy estimates should not be treated as calibrated whole-device energy.

Evidence and publication boundary

This is an edited account of the recorded experiment. The linked archive is private; the methods, aggregate findings and limits are included above. Reference recordings, raw conversations, authentication material and workstation configuration are excluded.