Is Qwen3.6-27B or Rocinante-XL-16B-v1 smaller?

Rocinante-XL-16B-v1 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 9.37 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs Rocinante-XL-16B-v1

At Q4_K_M, Rocinante-XL-16B-v1 is the smaller download — 10,063,921,216 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	Rocinante-XL-16B-v1
Parameters	27.8B	16.1B
Architecture	qwen35	llama
Layers	64	54
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	40	48
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	3.54 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	9.37 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Rocinante-XL-16B-v1	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.84 GiB	3.37×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.69 GiB	3.37×
16,384	1.00 GiB	3.38 GiB	3.37×
32,768	2.00 GiB	6.75 GiB	3.37×
65,536	4.00 GiB	13.50 GiB	3.37×
131,072	8.00 GiB	27.00 GiB	3.37×