Is granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct or Qwen3-8B smaller?

granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.88 GiB against 4.68 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct vs Qwen3-8B

At Q4_K_M, granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct is the smaller download — 2,016,888,096 bytes against 5,027,783,488. At long context the gap widens: granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct's KV cache at 32K is 2.3× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct	Qwen3-8B
Parameters	3.3B	8.2B
Architecture	granitemoe	qwen3
Layers	32	36
Native context	131,072	40,960
Mixture of experts	yes, 40 experts	no
Quantizations published	24	51
Smallest quantization	1.16 GiB	2.12 GiB
Q4_K_M	1.88 GiB	4.68 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-3.1-3b-a800m-instruct	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.56 GiB	2.25×
8,192	0.50 GiB	1.13 GiB	2.25×
16,384	1.00 GiB	2.25 GiB	2.25×
32,768	2.00 GiB	4.50 GiB	2.25×
65,536	4.00 GiB	9.00 GiB	2.25×
131,072	8.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	2.25×