Is Qwen3.6-27B or DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B smaller?

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 8.37 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

Qwen3.6-27B vs DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B

At Q4_K_M, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B is the smaller download — 8,988,109,952 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

	Qwen3.6-27B	DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B
Parameters	27.8B	14.8B
Architecture	qwen35	qwen2
Layers	64	48
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	37
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	4.38 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	8.37 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.75 GiB	3.00×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.50 GiB	3.00×
16,384	1.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	3.00×
32,768	2.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	3.00×
65,536	4.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	3.00×
131,072	8.00 GiB	24.00 GiB	3.00×