Nemotron 3.5 Lightning vs Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning)
Which is better for the money: Nemotron 3.5 Lightning by NVIDIA or Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) by Alibaba? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-26.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Nemotron 3.5 Lightning
Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) vs Nemotron 3.5 Lightning: 13.2% less intelligence, 254.5% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 414.7% slower end-to-end.
| Metric | Nemotron 3.5 Lightning | Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 12.9 | 11.2 | −13.2% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 13.2% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $92.76 | $328.86 | +254.5% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 3.5× more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 8.97s | 46.17s | +414.7% Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is 414.7% slower |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.20 | $0.14 / $0.20 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text, Image, Video |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (Xhigh) scores 34.60 for $66.8.
- Qwen3.5 9B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scores 46.30 for $207.
Nemotron 3.5 LightningQwen3.5 9B (Reasoning)Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
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Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-5-9b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/nemotron-3-5-lightning/qwen3-5-9b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill