Is Darwin-28B-Coder or Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct smaller?

Darwin-28B-Coder is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.66 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Darwin-28B-Coder — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Darwin-28B-Coder vs Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, Darwin-28B-Coder is the smaller download — 16,810,710,176 bytes against 18,556,689,568. At long context the gap widens: Darwin-28B-Coder's KV cache at 32K is 1.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Darwin-28B-Coder	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct
Parameters	26.9B	30.5B
Architecture	qwen35	qwen3moe
Layers	64	48
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 128 experts
Quantizations published	28	46
Smallest quantization	10.12 GiB	7.46 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.66 GiB	17.28 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Darwin-28B-Coder	Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.38 GiB	1.50×
8,192	0.50 GiB	0.75 GiB	1.50×
16,384	1.00 GiB	1.50 GiB	1.50×
32,768	2.00 GiB	3.00 GiB	1.50×
65,536	4.00 GiB	6.00 GiB	1.50×
131,072	8.00 GiB	12.00 GiB	1.50×