Is Qwen3.6-27B or gemma-2-27b-it smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 15.50 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs gemma-2-27b-it

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 16,645,381,632. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.3× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	gemma-2-27b-it
Parameters	27.8B	27.2B
Architecture	qwen35	gemma2
Layers	64	46
Native context	262,144	8,192
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	54
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	5.71 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	15.50 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	gemma-2-27b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	1.44 GiB	5.75×
8,192	0.50 GiB	2.25 GiB	4.49×
16,384	1.00 GiB	3.68 GiB	3.68×
32,768	2.00 GiB	6.56 GiB	3.28×
65,536	4.00 GiB	12.31 GiB	3.08×
131,072	8.00 GiB	23.81 GiB	2.98×