Is Qwen3.6-27B or dolphin-2.9.1-mixtral-1x22b smaller?

Both publish quantizations; compare the table for the exact sizes.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs dolphin-2.9.1-mixtral-1x22b

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.5× 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-2.9.1-mixtral-1x22b
Parameters	27.8B	22.2B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	56
Native context	262,144	65,536
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 1 experts
Quantizations published	40	45
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	4.49 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	—
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	dolphin-2.9.1-mixtral-1x22b	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.88 GiB	3.50×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.75 GiB	3.50×
16,384	1.00 GiB	3.50 GiB	3.50×
32,768	2.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	3.50×
65,536	4.00 GiB	14.00 GiB	3.50×
131,072	8.00 GiB	28.00 GiB	3.50×