Is Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506 or Qwen3.5-9B smaller?

Qwen3.5-9B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.24 GiB against 13.35 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B — its KV cache at 32K context is 5.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506 vs Qwen3.5-9B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-9B is the smaller download — 5,627,044,256 bytes against 14,333,909,728. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B's KV cache at 32K is 5.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506	Qwen3.5-9B
Parameters	24.0B	9.7B
Architecture	llama	qwen35
Layers	40	32
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	50	34
Smallest quantization	5.18 GiB	2.97 GiB
Q4_K_M	13.35 GiB	5.24 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Mistral-Small-3.2-24B-Instruct-2506	Qwen3.5-9B	Ratio
4,096	0.63 GiB	0.13 GiB	5.00×
8,192	1.25 GiB	0.25 GiB	5.00×
16,384	2.50 GiB	0.50 GiB	5.00×
32,768	5.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	5.00×
65,536	10.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	5.00×
131,072	20.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	5.00×