Is Qwen3.6-27B or Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 28.91 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 40.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 31,037,307,136. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 40.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct
Parameters	27.8B	51.5B
Architecture	qwen35	deci
Layers	64	80
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	25
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	13.07 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	28.91 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	other

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	10.00 GiB	39.97×
8,192	0.50 GiB	20.00 GiB	39.99×
16,384	1.00 GiB	40.00 GiB	39.99×
32,768	2.00 GiB	80.00 GiB	40.00×
65,536	4.00 GiB	160.00 GiB	40.00×
131,072	8.00 GiB	320.00 GiB	40.00×