Is Qwen3.6-27B or dolphin-2.6-mixtral-8x7b smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 24.63 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs dolphin-2.6-mixtral-8x7b

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 26,441,545,664. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 2.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	dolphin-2.6-mixtral-8x7b
Parameters	27.8B	46.7B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	32
Native context	262,144	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 8 experts
Quantizations published	40	43
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	9.15 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	24.63 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	dolphin-2.6-mixtral-8x7b	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.50 GiB	2.00×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.00 GiB	2.00×
16,384	1.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	2.00×
32,768	2.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.00×
65,536	4.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	2.00×
131,072	8.00 GiB	16.00 GiB	2.00×