Qwen3.5 Small nearly doubles long-context prefill

This is the kind of speedup that matters in real local AI work: prefill, not output tokens, is usually the bottleneck once prompts get huge. Qwen3.5 looks like a genuine architectural step up, not just a bigger checkpoint.

• –Qwen3.5's Gated DeltaNet plus attention layout is exactly the sort of design that should shine as context grows, so the 128K+ gap is the important signal.
• –Treat the Reddit numbers as directional, not lab-grade, but they line up with Qwen3.5's official long-context claims and 262K native context window.
• –LM Studio on Apple Silicon makes the comparison especially relevant for local developers running 4-bit quants instead of cloud APIs.
• –If your workflow is RAG, repo-scale agents, or document-heavy chat, Qwen3.5 is the more interesting local default; short prompts will feel much closer.