Is granite-4.1-30b or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 16.29 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-4.1-30b vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 17,490,240,736. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B'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-4.1-30b	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	28.9B	27.8B
Architecture	—	qwen35
Layers	64	64
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	18	40
Smallest quantization	9.99 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	16.29 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-4.1-30b	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	1.00 GiB	0.25 GiB	4.00×
8,192	2.00 GiB	0.50 GiB	4.00×
16,384	4.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	4.00×
32,768	8.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	4.00×
65,536	16.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	4.00×
131,072	32.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	4.00×