Is Qwen3.6-27B or deepseek-coder-33b-base smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 18.57 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs deepseek-coder-33b-base

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 19,940,659,168. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.9× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	deepseek-coder-33b-base
Parameters	27.8B	33.3B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	62
Native context	262,144	16,384
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	12
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	13.07 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	18.57 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	other

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	deepseek-coder-33b-base	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.97 GiB	3.87×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.94 GiB	3.87×
16,384	1.00 GiB	3.88 GiB	3.87×
32,768	2.00 GiB	7.75 GiB	3.87×
65,536	4.00 GiB	15.50 GiB	3.87×
131,072	8.00 GiB	31.00 GiB	3.87×