Is granite-3.1-2b-instruct or Qwen3-1.7B smaller?

Qwen3-1.7B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.03 GiB against 1.43 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

granite-3.1-2b-instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-3.1-2b-instruct vs Qwen3-1.7B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-1.7B is the smaller download — 1,107,409,472 bytes against 1,530,551,136. At long context the gap widens: granite-3.1-2b-instruct's KV cache at 32K is 1.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-3.1-2b-instruct	Qwen3-1.7B
Parameters	2.5B	2.0B
Architecture	granite	qwen3
Layers	40	28
Native context	131,072	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	44	48
Smallest quantization	0.56 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	1.43 GiB	1.03 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-3.1-2b-instruct	Qwen3-1.7B	Ratio
4,096	0.31 GiB	0.44 GiB	1.40×
8,192	0.63 GiB	0.88 GiB	1.40×
16,384	1.25 GiB	1.75 GiB	1.40×
32,768	2.50 GiB	3.50 GiB	1.40×
65,536	5.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	1.40×
131,072	10.00 GiB	14.00 GiB	1.40×