The Known Good Updated 2 Sep 2026 Subscribe
OpenAI: GPT-5.5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B ·OpenAI vs Alibaba

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 vs Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — head-to-head comparison

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 profile Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B profile All comparisons
OpenAI: GPT-5.5 — OpenAI
Quality
#5 of 65
93based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#65 of 339
85.0
Output tokens per second
Price
#412 of 439
$11.25
Blended per 1M tokens
In $5.00 · Out $30.00
Cache hit price
#295 of 322
$0.50
per 1M tokens (−90%)
Context
#30 of 473
1.05M
tokens (~1,600 pages)
Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — Alibaba
Quality
#37 of 65
66based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Known Good Index
Speed
#88 of 339
74.3
Output tokens per second
Price
#109 of 439
$0.30
Blended per 1M tokens
In $0.10 · Out $0.90
Cache hit price
#106 of 322
$0.050
per 1M tokens (−50%)
Context
#199 of 473
262k
tokens (~400 pages)
Summary

On the Known Good Index, OpenAI: GPT-5.5 scores 93 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B scores 66 — a 27-point lead for OpenAI: GPT-5.5. They share 3 published evaluations, with OpenAI: GPT-5.5 ahead on 2 and Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B ahead on 1.

Blended pricing is $11.25 per 1M tokens for OpenAI: GPT-5.5 and $0.30 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B — Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B is about 37.5× cheaper.

Throughput is 85 tokens per second for OpenAI: GPT-5.5 and 74 for Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B, with time to first token at 4.9s and 1.5s. OpenAI: GPT-5.5 accepts 1.05M tokens of context against 262k.

OpenAI: GPT-5.5 is proprietary; Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B is open weights under Open weights (unrestricted). 13 tracked hosts serve one or both.

Generated from tracked data on 3 Sep 2026 · how these comparisons are computed →

At a glance
MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Known Good Index 93 based on 3 of 7 evaluations 66 based on 3 of 7 evaluations
Blended $/1M $11.25 $0.30
Output tok/s 85 74
Context window 1.05M 262k
Providers 3 10
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Quality

Known Good Index and the capability indices, side by side

Index scores

Each index is min-max normalised across tracked models and scaled 0–100 from published evaluations. We do not run these evaluations.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Known Good Index 93 66
Openness Index 5 60
The Known Good

Quality Breakdown

Every evaluation both models report a published score for

Evaluations both models report

Bar = OpenAI: GPT-5.5 · marker = Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B · scores ingested from Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)

GPQA Diamond91 / 84
Mock AIME 2024–2584 / 87
Terminal-Bench85 / 23

Right-hand figures read OpenAI: GPT-5.5 / Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B. OpenAI: GPT-5.5 leads on 2 of 3, Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B on 1.

The Known Good

Arena Elo

Human preference rating from blind pairwise votes

Arena ratings

Elo from blind pairwise votes, ingested from Arena. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Text Arena 1,467 —
Text Arena (style controlled) 1,477 —
The Known Good

Price & Cost

Published API pricing by token type

Published pricing

USD per 1M tokens. Blended is a 3:1 input:output mix. Live from OpenRouter, cross-checked against models.dev. Lower is better.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Input $/1M $5.00 $0.10
Output $/1M $30.00 $0.90
Blended $/1M $11.25 $0.30
Cache read $/1M $0.500 $0.050
The Known Good
We publish blended price rather than cost-per-task. Cost-per-task requires token counts from an evaluation suite we do not run. Blended price is computed from published rates and is fully reproducible — see the pricing methodology.

Context Window

Maximum input accepted and maximum output emitted

Context and output limits

Provider-declared limits, from metadata via models.dev and OpenRouter. Higher is better.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Context window 1.05M 262k
Max output tokens 128k 236k
The Known Good

Speed & Latency

Mean throughput and time to first token across hosting providers, over successful measurements from the last 48 hours

Throughput and latency

Means across all tracked providers over successful measurements from the last 48 hours, derived from OpenRouter endpoint telemetry.

MetricOpenAI: GPT-5.5Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B
Output tokens/s 85 74
Time to first token 4.9s 1.5s
The Known Good

Providers

Which hosts serve each model, and at what price and speed

13 hosts
Full provider benchmarks →
Provider OpenAI: GPT-5.5 blendedOpenAI: GPT-5.5 tok/s Qwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B blendedQwen: Qwen3.6 35B A3B tok/s
Amazon Bedrock · first party $12.38 180 — —
OpenAI · first party $5.62 70 — —
Azure · first party $11.25 54 — —
CoreWeave — — $0.50 137
Phala — — $0.47 90
Io Net — — $0.44 85
AkashML — — $0.30 74
AtlasCloud — — $0.42 58
Parasail — — $0.36 55
Venice — — $0.33 52
SiliconFlow — — $0.55 51
Darkbloom — — $0.21 50
DeepInfra — — $0.31 25

Per-host pricing and telemetry from OpenRouter. A dash means that host does not serve that model.

The Known Good
Sources for this page
Pricing & providers — OpenRouter Metadata — models.dev Benchmarks — Epoch AI (CC-BY 4.0)Elo — Arena Full attribution →