Is Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct or Nethena-20B smaller?

Nethena-20B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 11.22 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 12.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Nethena-20B

At Q4_K_M, Nethena-20B is the smaller download — 12,042,208,800 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 12.9× 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	Nethena-20B
Parameters	30.5B	20.0B
Architecture	qwen3moe	llama
Layers	48	62
Native context	262,144	4,096
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	46	12
Smallest quantization	7.46 GiB	7.74 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.28 GiB	11.22 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	cc-by-nc-4.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Nethena-20B	Ratio
4,096	0.38 GiB	4.84 GiB	12.92×
8,192	0.75 GiB	9.69 GiB	12.92×
16,384	1.50 GiB	19.38 GiB	12.92×
32,768	3.00 GiB	38.75 GiB	12.92×
65,536	6.00 GiB	77.50 GiB	12.92×
131,072	12.00 GiB	155.00 GiB	12.92×