The 728 MHz power state inflated Qwen3.8 loading by 5.1x

A cold power cycle cuts identical Qwen3.8 FP8 model loading from 997.7 seconds to 193.8 seconds, superseding the low-power startup diagnosis.

Question. How much of the measured Qwen3.8 startup time came from the head’s latched 728 MHz power state?

setup
nodes	two GB10s, 6.17.13-rocket64k, 64 KiB pages
checkpoint	nvidia/Qwen3.8-Flash-Next-NVFP4 at fc694b54fb0174e0913e6adf86691ef85a4ead47
commit	6ba463e1485c57e9c990583f21fc7b353860eeb9
command	scripts/numerics/qwen38-expanded-calibration.sh --production --keep-running

phase	728 MHz run	cold-cycle run	speedup
target weights	659.81 s	114.07 s	5.78x
MTP weights	313.75 s	70.86 s	4.43x
total model loading	997.71 s	193.80 s	5.15x
model residency	63.29 GiB	63.29 GiB	1.00x

Loading weights took 114.07 seconds
Loading weights took 70.86 seconds
Model loading took 63.29 GiB memory and 193.803748 seconds

One run was measured in each power state. The checkpoint, runtime, FP8 overlay, 64 KiB loader, and two-pass target/MTP path were unchanged.

Verdict. Accepted. The latched power state owned most of the earlier 997.7-second load. The healthy 193.8-second result remains long enough to keep the prepacked one-pass slab on Rocket’s engine path.

Next.

• eliminate the second full checkpoint traversal with rank-local target and MTP slabs
• load final-layout slabs through 64 KiB-aligned bulk reads

Reopen if.

• GB10 firmware changes power-controller reset behavior
• vLLM replaces per-tensor checkpoint dispatch with bulk final-layout loading