Is Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2 or Qwen3.8-27B smaller?

Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.24 GiB against 15.66 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2 — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2 vs Qwen3.8-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2 is the smaller download — 5,629,105,408 bytes against 16,810,714,336. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2's KV cache at 32K is 2.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2	Qwen3.8-27B
Parameters	9.7B	27.8B
Architecture	qwen35	qwen35
Layers	32	64
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	8	22
Smallest quantization	4.31 GiB	8.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	5.24 GiB	15.66 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.5-9B-Claude-4.6-Opus-Reasoning-Distilled-v2	Qwen3.8-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.13 GiB	0.25 GiB	2.00×
8,192	0.25 GiB	0.50 GiB	2.00×
16,384	0.50 GiB	1.00 GiB	2.00×
32,768	1.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	2.00×
65,536	2.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.00×
131,072	4.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	2.00×