Is Qwen3.6-27B or ZAYA1-8B smaller?

ZAYA1-8B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.19 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

ZAYA1-8B — its KV cache at 32K context is 52433.6x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-27B vs ZAYA1-8B

At Q4_K_M, ZAYA1-8B is the smaller download — 5,567,581,549 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: ZAYA1-8B's KV cache at 32K is 52433.6× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-27B	ZAYA1-8B
Parameters	27.8B	8.8B
Architecture	qwen35	zaya
Layers	64	40
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 16 experts
Quantizations published	40	6
Smallest quantization	8.74 GiB	4.20 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.41 GiB	5.19 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	6558.40×
8,192	0.50 GiB	13112.00×
16,384	1.00 GiB	26219.20×
32,768	2.00 GiB	52433.60×
65,536	4.00 GiB	104862.40×
131,072	8.00 GiB	209720.00×