Is Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3.6-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.41 GiB against 28.91 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 40.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.6-27B is the smaller download — 16,547,397,888 bytes against 31,037,307,136. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 40.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	51.5B	27.8B
Architecture	deci	qwen35
Layers	80	64
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	25	40
Smallest quantization	13.07 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	28.91 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	other	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Llama-3_1-Nemotron-51B-Instruct	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	10.00 GiB	0.25 GiB	39.97×
8,192	20.00 GiB	0.50 GiB	39.99×
16,384	40.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	39.99×
32,768	80.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	40.00×
65,536	160.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	40.00×
131,072	320.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	40.00×