Is Fara-7B or Qwen3.5-9B smaller?

Fara-7B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.36 GiB against 5.24 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Fara-7B vs Qwen3.5-9B

At Q4_K_M, Fara-7B is the smaller download — 4,683,072,000 bytes against 5,627,044,256. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B's KV cache at 32K is 1.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Fara-7B	Qwen3.5-9B
Parameters	8.3B	9.7B
Architecture	qwen2vl	qwen35
Layers	28	32
Native context	128,000	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	39	34
Smallest quantization	2.59 GiB	2.97 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.36 GiB	5.24 GiB
Licence	mit	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Fara-7B	Qwen3.5-9B	Ratio
4,096	0.22 GiB	0.13 GiB	1.75×
8,192	0.44 GiB	0.25 GiB	1.75×
16,384	0.88 GiB	0.50 GiB	1.75×
32,768	1.75 GiB	1.00 GiB	1.75×
65,536	3.50 GiB	2.00 GiB	1.75×
131,072	7.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	1.75×