Is Qwen3.6-27B or Nous-Hermes-Llama2-70b smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 38.58 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 Nous-Hermes-Llama2-70b

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 41,422,921,728. 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	Nous-Hermes-Llama2-70b
Parameters	27.8B	69.0B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	80
Native context	262,144	4,096
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	30
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	13.54 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	38.58 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	mit

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Nous-Hermes-Llama2-70b	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×