Is Qwen3-0.6B or Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3-0.6B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.37 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-0.6B vs Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-0.6B is the smaller download — 396,705,472 bytes against 807,690,688. At long context the gap widens: Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 3.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-0.6B	Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct
Parameters	752M	1.2B
Architecture	qwen3	llama
Layers	28	16
Native context	40,960	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	44	39
Smallest quantization	0.20 GiB	0.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.37 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	—	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-0.6B	Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.44 GiB	0.13 GiB	3.50×
8,192	0.88 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.50×
16,384	1.75 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.50×
32,768	3.50 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.50×
65,536	7.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.50×
131,072	14.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.50×