Is Nanbeige4.2-3B or Qwen3-8B smaller?

Nanbeige4.2-3B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 2.40 GiB against 4.68 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Nanbeige4.2-3B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.6x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Nanbeige4.2-3B vs Qwen3-8B

At Q4_K_M, Nanbeige4.2-3B is the smaller download — 2,574,807,904 bytes against 5,027,783,488. At long context the gap widens: Nanbeige4.2-3B's KV cache at 32K is 1.6× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Nanbeige4.2-3B	Qwen3-8B
Parameters	4.2B	8.2B
Architecture	nanbeige	qwen3
Layers	22	36
Native context	262,144	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	22	51
Smallest quantization	1.64 GiB	2.12 GiB
Q4_K_M	2.40 GiB	4.68 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Nanbeige4.2-3B	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.34 GiB	0.56 GiB	1.64×
8,192	0.69 GiB	1.13 GiB	1.64×
16,384	1.38 GiB	2.25 GiB	1.64×
32,768	2.75 GiB	4.50 GiB	1.64×
65,536	5.50 GiB	9.00 GiB	1.64×
131,072	11.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	1.64×