Qwen3.5-9B
Qwen3.5-9B is a 9B dense model that outperforms Qwen3-30B on most benchmarks and beats GPT-5-Nano on vision tasks. Natively multimodal with 262K-1M context, Apache 2.0 licensed.
James Kowalski
AI Benchmarks & Tools Analyst
James is a software engineer turned tech writer who spent six years building backend systems at a fintech startup in Chicago before pivoting to full-time analysis of AI tools and infrastructure. His engineering background means he doesn't just read the spec sheet - he runs the benchmarks, profiles the latency, and checks whether the marketing claims hold up under real workloads.
He studied Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he first got hooked on natural language processing during a senior research project on sentiment analysis. He later completed a certificate in data journalism from Northwestern's Medill School.
At Awesome Agents, James owns the leaderboards and tool comparison coverage. He maintains the site's benchmark tracking methodology and is the person who actually runs the numbers before publishing any ranking. He is also an open-source advocate and contributes to several projects in the LLM inference space.
Based in Chicago, IL.
Articles by James Kowalski
AWS Trainium3 - Amazon's 3nm AI Accelerator
Complete specs, benchmarks, and analysis of AWS Trainium3 - Amazon's TSMC 3nm AI chip with 2.52 PFLOPS FP8, 144GB HBM3e, and NeuronLink-v4, powering Anthropic's Claude through Project Rainier.
Etched Sohu - Transformer-Only Inference ASIC
Full specs and critical analysis of the Etched Sohu - a transformer-specific ASIC claiming 500K+ tokens/sec on Llama 70B, built on TSMC 4nm with 144GB HBM3E. Bold claims, but no independent benchmarks yet.
Hailo-10H - Edge AI With On-Device LLMs
Complete specs, benchmarks, and analysis of the Hailo-10H - a 2.5W edge AI accelerator with 40 TOPS INT4, on-module LPDDR4, and the ability to run LLMs and VLMs on a Raspberry Pi at 10 tokens per second.
NVIDIA Rubin CPX - Inference GPU With GDDR7
Full specs, benchmarks, and analysis of the NVIDIA Rubin CPX - a purpose-built inference GPU with 128GB GDDR7, 30 PFLOPS NVFP4, and 3x faster attention versus Blackwell, targeting million-token context workloads.
Tenstorrent Blackhole p150a - RISC-V AI Card
Complete specs, benchmarks, and analysis of the Tenstorrent Blackhole p150a - the $1,399 PCIe AI accelerator with 120 Tensix cores, 768 RISC-V processors, 32GB GDDR6, and fully open-source software.
Math Olympiad AI Leaderboard - March 2026 Rankings
Rankings of AI models on competition mathematics benchmarks including AIME 2025, IMO, MathArena, and FrontierMath, measuring the cutting edge of mathematical reasoning.
AMD Instinct MI440X - CDNA 5 Enterprise GPU
Complete specs and analysis of the AMD Instinct MI440X - a CDNA 5 enterprise GPU with 432GB HBM4, 19.6 TB/s bandwidth, and TSMC 2nm compute chiplets.
Intel Crescent Island - Inference-Only AI GPU
Intel Crescent Island specs and analysis - an Xe3P inference GPU with 160GB LPDDR5X, air cooling, and a cost-optimized approach to AI serving.
NVIDIA Rubin R200 - Next-Gen AI Superchip
Complete specs, benchmarks, and analysis of the NVIDIA Rubin R200 GPU - the post-Blackwell flagship with 288GB HBM4, 22 TB/s bandwidth, and 50 PFLOPS FP4.
Qualcomm AI200 - Rack-Scale Inference ASIC
Qualcomm AI200 specs and analysis - a Hexagon-based inference accelerator with 768GB LPDDR per card, rack-scale design, and a focus on inference TCO.
SambaNova SN50 RDU - Agentic Inference Chip
Complete specs and analysis of SambaNova's SN50 RDU - a TSMC 3nm dataflow chip with 3.2 PFLOPS FP8, three-tier memory, and claimed 5x speed over NVIDIA B200.
