Is Hermes-4.3-36B-heretic or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 20.27 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Hermes-4.3-36B-heretic vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 21,762,146,464. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 4.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Hermes-4.3-36B-heretic	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	36.2B	27.8B
Architecture	seed_oss	qwen35
Layers	64	64
Native context	524,288	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	34	40
Smallest quantization	7.50 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	20.27 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Hermes-4.3-36B-heretic	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	1.00 GiB	0.25 GiB	4.00×
8,192	2.00 GiB	0.50 GiB	4.00×
16,384	4.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	4.00×
32,768	8.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	4.00×
65,536	16.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	4.00×
131,072	32.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	4.00×