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

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

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.2x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

ZAYA1-8B-Coder vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, ZAYA1-8B-Coder is the smaller download — 5,567,581,024 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 1.2× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	ZAYA1-8B-Coder	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	8.8B	27.8B
Architecture	zaya	qwen35
Layers	80	64
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 16 experts	no
Quantizations published	3	40
Smallest quantization	5.19 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	5.19 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	ZAYA1-8B-Coder	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.31 GiB	0.25 GiB	1.25×
8,192	0.63 GiB	0.50 GiB	1.25×
16,384	1.25 GiB	1.00 GiB	1.25×
32,768	2.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	1.25×
65,536	5.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	1.25×
131,072	10.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	1.25×