Is granite-4.0-1b or Qwen3-1.7B smaller?

granite-4.0-1b is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.95 GiB against 1.03 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

granite-4.0-1b — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

granite-4.0-1b vs Qwen3-1.7B

At Q4_K_M, granite-4.0-1b is the smaller download — 1,023,645,440 bytes against 1,107,409,472. At long context the gap widens: granite-4.0-1b's KV cache at 32K is 1.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	granite-4.0-1b	Qwen3-1.7B
Parameters	1.6B	2.0B
Architecture	granite	qwen3
Layers	40	28
Native context	131,072	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	35	48
Smallest quantization	0.44 GiB	0.50 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.95 GiB	1.03 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	granite-4.0-1b	Qwen3-1.7B	Ratio
4,096	0.31 GiB	0.44 GiB	1.40×
8,192	0.63 GiB	0.88 GiB	1.40×
16,384	1.25 GiB	1.75 GiB	1.40×
32,768	2.50 GiB	3.50 GiB	1.40×
65,536	5.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	1.40×
131,072	10.00 GiB	14.00 GiB	1.40×