# Notes on MTP, EAGLE-3 and DFlash

> Source: <https://www.dotnetperls.com/2026_7_7_notes-mtp-eagle-dflash>
> Published: 2026-07-07 07:00:00+00:00

**Speculative decoding** is a huge speedup for local inference of LLMs in `llama-cpp`

(and similar programs). Recently I have tried to adjust the settings for MTP, EAGLE-3 and DFlash to get higher **tokens per second** on my NVidia 3060 RTX 12 GB GPU.

For larger models like Qwen 3.6 35B and Gemma 4 26B, I have found that using a **lower** `spec-draft-n-max`

setting (for `llama-cpp`

) is beneficial. I have found 1 works better than 2 or 3 (or 0) for MPT, EAGLE-3 and DFlash on these larger models.

I compared **DFlash** with **EAGLE-3** in Gemma 4 26B, and found that with a `spec-draft-n-max`

of 1, DFlash was **slightly faster** than EAGLE-3. For consumer GPUs like the 3060, it seems beneficial to reduce the speculation being done, and use smaller speculative models (the DFlash model I have is smaller than the EAGLE-3 one).

Overall, I found that **MTP speculative decoding** improved the tokens per second in my coding model (Qwen 3.6 35B AutoRound) from 24 to 39 tokens per second, which is a 38% speedup. It is important on some GPUs to use a lower value for `spec-draft-n-max`

, even setting it to 1.