Is Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1 or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct smaller?

Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.24 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1 — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1 vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1 is the smaller download — 5,629,109,696 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1'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

	Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters	9.7B	30.5B
Architecture	qwen35	qwen3moe
Layers	32	48
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 128 experts
Quantizations published	35	46
Smallest quantization	3.65 GiB	7.46 GiB
Q4_K_M	5.24 GiB	17.28 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.5-9B-Fable-5-v1	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.13 GiB	0.38 GiB	3.00×
8,192	0.25 GiB	0.75 GiB	3.00×
16,384	0.50 GiB	1.50 GiB	3.00×
32,768	1.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	3.00×
65,536	2.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	3.00×
131,072	4.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	3.00×