Is granite-4.1-30b or Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 smaller?

granite-4.1-30b is smaller at Q4_K_M: 16.29 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-4.1-30b vs Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507

At Q4_K_M, granite-4.1-30b is the smaller download — 17,490,240,736 bytes against 18,556,685,824. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507's KV cache at 32K is 2.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-4.1-30b	Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507
Parameters	28.9B	30.5B
Architecture	—	qwen3moe
Layers	64	48
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 128 experts
Quantizations published	18	51
Smallest quantization	9.99 GiB	7.05 GiB
Q4_K_M	16.29 GiB	17.28 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-4.1-30b	Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507	Ratio
4,096	1.00 GiB	0.38 GiB	2.67×
8,192	2.00 GiB	0.75 GiB	2.67×
16,384	4.00 GiB	1.50 GiB	2.67×
32,768	8.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	2.67×
65,536	16.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	2.67×
131,072	32.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	2.67×