Is Qwen3.6-35B-A3B or Fara1.5-27B smaller?

Fara1.5-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 19.71 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.2x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.6-35B-A3B vs Fara1.5-27B

At Q4_K_M, Fara1.5-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,399,232 bytes against 21,166,757,728. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's KV cache at 32K is 3.2× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	Fara1.5-27B
Parameters	36.0B	27.4B
Architecture	qwen35moe	qwen35
Layers	40	64
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 256 experts	no
Quantizations published	61	44
Smallest quantization	8.77 GiB	9.90 GiB
Q4_K_M	19.71 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	mit

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.6-35B-A3B	Fara1.5-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.08 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.20×
8,192	0.16 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.20×
16,384	0.31 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.20×
32,768	0.63 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.20×
65,536	1.25 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.20×
131,072	2.50 GiB	8.00 GiB	3.20×