Is SOLAR-10.7B-Instruct-v1.0 or Qwen3-8B smaller?

Qwen3-8B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.68 GiB against 6.02 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-8B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

SOLAR-10.7B-Instruct-v1.0 vs Qwen3-8B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-8B is the smaller download — 5,027,783,488 bytes against 6,461,667,936. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-8B'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

	SOLAR-10.7B-Instruct-v1.0	Qwen3-8B
Parameters	10.7B	8.2B
Architecture	llama	qwen3
Layers	48	36
Native context	4,096	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	48	51
Smallest quantization	2.19 GiB	2.12 GiB
Q4_K_M	6.02 GiB	4.68 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	SOLAR-10.7B-Instruct-v1.0	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.75 GiB	0.56 GiB	1.33×
8,192	1.50 GiB	1.13 GiB	1.33×
16,384	3.00 GiB	2.25 GiB	1.33×
32,768	6.00 GiB	4.50 GiB	1.33×
65,536	12.00 GiB	9.00 GiB	1.33×
131,072	24.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	1.33×