Is Qwen3-Embedding-8B or nomic-embed-code smaller?

nomic-embed-code is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.08 GiB against 4.36 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

nomic-embed-code — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.6x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-Embedding-8B vs nomic-embed-code

At Q4_K_M, nomic-embed-code is the smaller download — 4,376,511,808 bytes against 4,676,804,928. At long context the gap widens: nomic-embed-code's KV cache at 32K is 2.6× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-Embedding-8B	nomic-embed-code
Parameters	7.6B	7.1B
Architecture	qwen3	qwen2
Layers	36	28
Native context	40,960	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	17	42
Smallest quantization	2.87 GiB	2.37 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.36 GiB	4.08 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-Embedding-8B	nomic-embed-code	Ratio
4,096	0.56 GiB	0.22 GiB	2.57×
8,192	1.13 GiB	0.44 GiB	2.57×
16,384	2.25 GiB	0.88 GiB	2.57×
32,768	4.50 GiB	1.75 GiB	2.57×
65,536	9.00 GiB	3.50 GiB	2.57×
131,072	18.00 GiB	7.00 GiB	2.57×