Is granite-4.0-h-small or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 18.14 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

granite-4.0-h-small — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-4.0-h-small vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 19,476,621,984. At long context the gap widens: granite-4.0-h-small's KV cache at 32K is 4.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-4.0-h-small	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	32.2B	27.8B
Architecture	granitehybrid	qwen35
Layers	40	64
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 72 experts	no
Quantizations published	41	40
Smallest quantization	7.59 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	18.14 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-4.0-h-small	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.06 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.99×
8,192	0.13 GiB	0.50 GiB	4.00×
16,384	0.25 GiB	1.00 GiB	4.00×
32,768	0.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	4.00×
65,536	1.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	4.00×
131,072	2.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	4.00×