Is Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct or Phi-4-reasoning smaller?

Phi-4-reasoning is smaller at Q4_K_M: 8.43 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct vs Phi-4-reasoning

At Q4_K_M, Phi-4-reasoning is the smaller download — 9,053,116,096 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct's KV cache at 32K is 2.1× 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	Phi-4-reasoning
Parameters	30.5B	14.7B
Architecture	qwen3moe	phi3
Layers	48	40
Native context	262,144	32,768
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	46	46
Smallest quantization	7.46 GiB	3.33 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.28 GiB	8.43 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	mit

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Phi-4-reasoning	Ratio
4,096	0.38 GiB	0.78 GiB	2.08×
8,192	0.75 GiB	1.56 GiB	2.08×
16,384	1.50 GiB	3.13 GiB	2.08×
32,768	3.00 GiB	6.25 GiB	2.08×
65,536	6.00 GiB	12.50 GiB	2.08×
131,072	12.00 GiB	25.00 GiB	2.08×