Is zeta-2.1 or Qwen3-8B smaller?

Qwen3-8B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.68 GiB against 4.72 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

zeta-2.1 — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-8B is the smaller download — 5,027,783,488 bytes against 5,071,409,664.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	zeta-2.1	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.50 GiB	0.56 GiB	1.13×
8,192	1.00 GiB	1.13 GiB	1.13×
16,384	2.00 GiB	2.25 GiB	1.13×
32,768	4.00 GiB	4.50 GiB	1.13×
65,536	8.00 GiB	9.00 GiB	1.13×
131,072	16.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	1.13×