Routide Runs Qwen3.6-35B-A3B on iPhone by Paging Experts From Flash, and Cache Policy Decides Whether It Works

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Musa Shams's arXiv 2609.29032 presents Routide, a Swift/MLX runtime that keeps a quantized Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's expert weights in iPhone storage and holds a byte-budgeted subset in memory. On five recorded 128-token workloads, a 512 MiB LRU cache got 0.00% hits, seeded random eviction at the same budget got 18.80%, and 576 MiB LRU got 38.58%, so the apparent memory cliff comes from how policy and workload interact. iOS 27 process peaks were 1.87-2.73 GiB. The author also reports a thermal stop and says the phone's token sequences disagreed with a resident-Python reference on all five cases.