Is Qwen3-14B or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3-14B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 8.38 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.6-27B — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-14B vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-14B is the smaller download — 9,001,752,960 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.6-27B's KV cache at 32K is 2.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-14B	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	14.8B	27.8B
Architecture	qwen3	qwen35
Layers	40	64
Native context	40,960	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	29	40
Smallest quantization	3.56 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	8.38 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-14B	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.63 GiB	0.25 GiB	2.50×
8,192	1.25 GiB	0.50 GiB	2.50×
16,384	2.50 GiB	1.00 GiB	2.50×
32,768	5.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	2.50×
65,536	10.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.50×
131,072	20.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	2.50×