Is Qwen3.8-27B or Gemma-3-27B-MeditronFO smaller?

Qwen3.8-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.66 GiB against 16.15 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.8-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.6x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.8-27B vs Gemma-3-27B-MeditronFO

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.8-27B is the smaller download — 16,810,714,336 bytes against 17,339,606,784. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.8-27B's KV cache at 32K is 1.6× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.8-27B	Gemma-3-27B-MeditronFO
Parameters	27.8B	28.8B
Architecture	qwen35	gemma3
Layers	64	62
Native context	262,144	—
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	22	34
Smallest quantization	8.39 GiB	6.26 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.66 GiB	16.15 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.8-27B	Gemma-3-27B-MeditronFO	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.92 GiB	3.68×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.23 GiB	2.47×
16,384	1.00 GiB	1.86 GiB	1.86×
32,768	2.00 GiB	3.11 GiB	1.55×
65,536	4.00 GiB	5.61 GiB	1.40×
131,072	8.00 GiB	10.61 GiB	1.33×