Is Qwen3.6-27B or Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 27.66 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 29,702,758,784. At long context the gap widens: Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 2.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters	27.8B	49.1B
Architecture	qwen35	kimi-linear
Layers	64	27
Native context	262,144	—
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 256 experts
Quantizations published	40	38
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	9.77 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	27.66 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	mit

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Kimi-Linear-48B-A3B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.12 GiB	2.11×
8,192	0.50 GiB	0.24 GiB	2.11×
16,384	1.00 GiB	0.47 GiB	2.11×
32,768	2.00 GiB	0.95 GiB	2.11×
65,536	4.00 GiB	1.90 GiB	2.11×
131,072	8.00 GiB	3.80 GiB	2.11×