Is Qwen3.6-27B or Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16 smaller?

Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 7.67 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16

At Q4_K_M, Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16 is the smaller download — 8,239,067,680 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 2.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16
Parameters	27.8B	13.9B
Architecture	qwen35	mistral3
Layers	64	40
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	28
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	4.20 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	7.67 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Ministral-3-14B-Instruct-2512-BF16	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.63 GiB	2.50×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.25 GiB	2.50×
16,384	1.00 GiB	2.50 GiB	2.50×
32,768	2.00 GiB	5.00 GiB	2.50×
65,536	4.00 GiB	10.00 GiB	2.50×
131,072	8.00 GiB	20.00 GiB	2.50×