Is Qwen3.6-27B or QwQ-32B-Snowdrop-v0 smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 18.49 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs QwQ-32B-Snowdrop-v0

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 19,848,503,168. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 4.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	QwQ-32B-Snowdrop-v0
Parameters	27.8B	32.8B
Architecture	qwen35	qwen2
Layers	64	64
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	49
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	6.77 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	18.49 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	QwQ-32B-Snowdrop-v0	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	1.00 GiB	4.00×
8,192	0.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	4.00×
16,384	1.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	4.00×
32,768	2.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	4.00×
65,536	4.00 GiB	16.00 GiB	4.00×
131,072	8.00 GiB	32.00 GiB	4.00×