Is Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking or Qwen3.5-9B smaller?

Qwen3.5-9B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.24 GiB against 17.28 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking vs Qwen3.5-9B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-9B is the smaller download — 5,627,044,256 bytes against 18,556,687,200. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B's KV cache at 32K is 3.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking	Qwen3.5-9B
Parameters	31.1B	9.7B
Architecture	qwen3vlmoe	qwen35
Layers	48	32
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	49	34
Smallest quantization	7.05 GiB	2.97 GiB
Q4_K_M	17.28 GiB	5.24 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-VL-30B-A3B-Thinking	Qwen3.5-9B	Ratio
4,096	0.38 GiB	0.13 GiB	3.00×
8,192	0.75 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.00×
16,384	1.50 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.00×
32,768	3.00 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.00×
65,536	6.00 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.00×
131,072	12.00 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.00×