Is Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1 or Qwen3.8-27B smaller?

Qwen3.8-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.66 GiB against 79.71 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.8-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1 vs Qwen3.8-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.8-27B is the smaller download — 16,810,714,336 bytes against 85,586,760,928. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.8-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1	Qwen3.8-27B
Parameters	141B	27.8B
Architecture	llama	qwen35
Layers	56	64
Native context	65,536	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 8 experts	no
Quantizations published	28	22
Smallest quantization	16.99 GiB	8.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	79.71 GiB	15.66 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Mixtral-8x22B-v0.1	Qwen3.8-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.88 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.50×
8,192	1.75 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.50×
16,384	3.50 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.50×
32,768	7.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.50×
65,536	14.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.50×
131,072	28.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	3.50×