Is gemma-2-9b or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

gemma-2-9b is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.37 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-2-9b vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, gemma-2-9b is the smaller download — 5,761,057,664 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-2-9b	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	9.2B	27.8B
Architecture	gemma2	qwen35
Layers	42	64
Native context	8,192	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	18	40
Smallest quantization	3.54 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	5.37 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	gemma	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-2-9b	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	1.31 GiB	0.25 GiB	5.25×
8,192	2.05 GiB	0.50 GiB	4.10×
16,384	3.36 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.36×
32,768	5.99 GiB	2.00 GiB	2.99×
65,536	11.24 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.81×
131,072	21.74 GiB	8.00 GiB	2.72×