Is Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct or Qwen3-1.7B smaller?

Qwen3-1.7B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.03 GiB against 1.06 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.8x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct vs Qwen3-1.7B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-1.7B is the smaller download — 1,107,409,472 bytes against 1,133,084,864. At long context the gap widens: Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 1.8× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct	Qwen3-1.7B
Parameters	1.8B	2.0B
Architecture	hunyuan-dense	qwen3
Layers	32	28
Native context	262,144	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	23	48
Smallest quantization	0.65 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	1.06 GiB	1.03 GiB
Licence	—	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Hunyuan-1.8B-Instruct	Qwen3-1.7B	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.44 GiB	1.75×
8,192	0.50 GiB	0.88 GiB	1.75×
16,384	1.00 GiB	1.75 GiB	1.75×
32,768	2.00 GiB	3.50 GiB	1.75×
65,536	4.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	1.75×
131,072	8.00 GiB	14.00 GiB	1.75×