Is Qwen3.6-27B or Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 smaller?

Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 6.96 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 Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407

At Q4_K_M, Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407 is the smaller download — 7,477,204,928 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	Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407
Parameters	27.8B	12.2B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	40
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	35
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	4.13 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	6.96 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Mistral-Nemo-Instruct-2407	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×