Is Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct or Dolphin-X1-8B smaller?

Dolphin-X1-8B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.58 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Dolphin-X1-8B

At Q4_K_M, Dolphin-X1-8B is the smaller download — 4,920,738,784 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 1.3× 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	Dolphin-X1-8B
Parameters	30.5B	8.0B
Architecture	qwen3moe	llama
Layers	48	32
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	46	5
Smallest quantization	7.46 GiB	4.03 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.28 GiB	4.58 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	llama3.1

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Dolphin-X1-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.38 GiB	0.50 GiB	1.33×
8,192	0.75 GiB	1.00 GiB	1.33×
16,384	1.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	1.33×
32,768	3.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	1.33×
65,536	6.00 GiB	8.00 GiB	1.33×
131,072	12.00 GiB	16.00 GiB	1.33×