Is bitnet_b1_58-large or Qwen3-1.7B smaller?

Both publish quantizations; compare the table for the exact sizes.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-1.7B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

bitnet_b1_58-large vs Qwen3-1.7B

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-1.7B'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

	bitnet_b1_58-large	Qwen3-1.7B
Parameters	729M	2.0B
Architecture	bitnet	qwen3
Layers	24	28
Native context	2,048	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	1	48
Smallest quantization	0.20 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	—	1.03 GiB
Licence	mit	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	bitnet_b1_58-large	Qwen3-1.7B	Ratio
4,096	0.56 GiB	0.44 GiB	1.29×
8,192	1.13 GiB	0.88 GiB	1.29×
16,384	2.25 GiB	1.75 GiB	1.29×
32,768	4.50 GiB	3.50 GiB	1.29×
65,536	9.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	1.29×
131,072	18.00 GiB	14.00 GiB	1.29×