Is L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct smaller?

L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 9.51 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B is the smaller download — 10,207,765,536 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 3.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters	16.5B	30.5B
Architecture	llama	qwen3moe
Layers	71	48
Native context	8,192	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 128 experts
Quantizations published	10	46
Smallest quantization	7.00 GiB	7.46 GiB
Q4_K_M	9.51 GiB	17.28 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	L3-DARKEST-PLANET-16.5B	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	1.11 GiB	0.38 GiB	2.96×
8,192	2.22 GiB	0.75 GiB	2.96×
16,384	4.44 GiB	1.50 GiB	2.96×
32,768	8.88 GiB	3.00 GiB	2.96×
65,536	17.75 GiB	6.00 GiB	2.96×
131,072	35.50 GiB	12.00 GiB	2.96×