Is Qwen3.6-27B or Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 39.60 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 5.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 42,520,393,120. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 5.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct
Parameters	27.8B	70.6B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	80
Native context	262,144	8,192
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	32
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	14.29 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	39.60 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	other

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Meta-Llama-3-70B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	1.25 GiB	5.00×
8,192	0.50 GiB	2.50 GiB	5.00×
16,384	1.00 GiB	5.00 GiB	5.00×
32,768	2.00 GiB	10.00 GiB	5.00×
65,536	4.00 GiB	20.00 GiB	5.00×
131,072	8.00 GiB	40.00 GiB	5.00×