Is granite-4.1-8b or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct smaller?

granite-4.1-8b is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.98 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-4.1-8b vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, granite-4.1-8b is the smaller download — 5,347,914,400 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 1.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-4.1-8b	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters	8.8B	30.5B
Architecture	—	qwen3moe
Layers	40	48
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 128 experts
Quantizations published	30	46
Smallest quantization	3.05 GiB	7.46 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.98 GiB	17.28 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-4.1-8b	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.63 GiB	0.38 GiB	1.67×
8,192	1.25 GiB	0.75 GiB	1.67×
16,384	2.50 GiB	1.50 GiB	1.67×
32,768	5.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	1.67×
65,536	10.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	1.67×
131,072	20.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	1.67×