Is Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base or Qwen3.6-27B smaller?

Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base is smaller at Q4_K_M: 8.84 GiB against 15.41 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base vs Qwen3.6-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base is the smaller download — 9,496,453,792 bytes against 16,547,397,888. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base's KV cache at 32K is 1.3× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base	Qwen3.6-27B
Parameters	15.6B	27.8B
Architecture	qwen3moe	qwen35
Layers	24	64
Native context	4,096	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	11	40
Smallest quantization	5.41 GiB	8.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	8.84 GiB	15.41 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-15B-A2B-Base	Qwen3.6-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.19 GiB	0.25 GiB	1.33×
8,192	0.38 GiB	0.50 GiB	1.33×
16,384	0.75 GiB	1.00 GiB	1.33×
32,768	1.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	1.33×
65,536	3.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	1.33×
131,072	6.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	1.33×