Is phi-4 or Qwen3.8-27B smaller?

phi-4 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 8.28 GiB against 15.66 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.8-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

phi-4 vs Qwen3.8-27B

At Q4_K_M, phi-4 is the smaller download — 8,890,306,112 bytes against 16,810,714,336. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.8-27B's KV cache at 32K is 3.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	phi-4	Qwen3.8-27B
Parameters	14.7B	27.8B
Architecture	phi3	qwen35
Layers	40	64
Native context	16,384	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	37	22
Smallest quantization	4.18 GiB	8.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	8.28 GiB	15.66 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	phi-4	Qwen3.8-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.78 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.12×
8,192	1.56 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.12×
16,384	3.13 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.12×
32,768	6.25 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.12×
65,536	12.50 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.12×
131,072	25.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	3.12×