Is Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker or Qwen3.5-4B smaller?

Qwen3.5-4B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 2.52 GiB against 8.18 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-4B — its KV cache at 32K context is 6.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker vs Qwen3.5-4B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-4B is the smaller download — 2,707,513,696 bytes against 8,785,478,144. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-4B's KV cache at 32K is 6.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker	Qwen3.5-4B
Parameters	14.9B	4.7B
Architecture	llama	qwen35
Layers	48	32
Native context	262,400	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	60	57
Smallest quantization	3.22 GiB	1.42 GiB
Q4_K_M	8.18 GiB	2.52 GiB
Licence	mit	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Apriel-1.6-15b-Thinker	Qwen3.5-4B	Ratio
4,096	0.75 GiB	0.13 GiB	6.00×
8,192	1.50 GiB	0.25 GiB	6.00×
16,384	3.00 GiB	0.50 GiB	6.00×
32,768	6.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	6.00×
65,536	12.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	6.00×
131,072	24.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	6.00×