Is Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct or Darwin-36B-Opus smaller?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct is smaller at Q4_K_M: 17.28 GiB against 19.71 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Darwin-36B-Opus — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.8x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Darwin-36B-Opus

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct is the smaller download — 18,556,689,568 bytes against 21,166,757,568. At long context the gap widens: Darwin-36B-Opus's KV cache at 32K is 4.8× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Darwin-36B-Opus
Parameters	30.5B	34.7B
Architecture	qwen3moe	qwen35moe
Layers	48	40
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	yes, 256 experts
Quantizations published	46	7
Smallest quantization	7.46 GiB	4.75 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.28 GiB	19.71 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Darwin-36B-Opus	Ratio
4,096	0.38 GiB	0.08 GiB	4.80×
8,192	0.75 GiB	0.16 GiB	4.80×
16,384	1.50 GiB	0.31 GiB	4.80×
32,768	3.00 GiB	0.63 GiB	4.80×
65,536	6.00 GiB	1.25 GiB	4.80×
131,072	12.00 GiB	2.50 GiB	4.80×