Qwen3-8B vs Phi-3.5-mini-instruct

Specs, VRAM requirements and download trends — updated 10 November 2026.

Qwen · A · Open weights
Params
8.2 B
Context
40,960
30d
6.8 M
apache-2.0 · commercial OK
microsoft · B · Open weights
Params
3.8 B
Context
131,072
30d
367 K
mit · commercial OK

Specification comparison

Differences are highlighted; identical values are muted.

Specification Qwen3-8B Phi-3.5-mini-instruct
Parameters 8.2 B 3.8 B
Architecture Qwen3ForCausalLM Phi3ForCausalLM
Context length 40,960 131,072
Licence apache-2.0 mit
Commercial use Allowed Allowed
Languages — 1
Downloads 30d 6,837,564 367,275
Downloads all time 137.6 M 13.3 M
Quantizations on the Hub SAFETENSORS SAFETENSORS
Gated No No
First seen on the Hub 2025-04-27 2024-08-16

Download trend

Daily snapshots, last 90 days (13 Aug – 10 Nov)

16.4 M277 K
Qwen3-8B Phi-3.5-mini-instruct

VRAM side by side

On RTX 4090 · 24 GB · 8K context unless noted

Phi-3.5-mini-instruct · fp16 @ 128K ctx 18.1 GB / 24 GB
✅ Runs comfortably
Qwen3-8B · fp16 19.7 GB / 24 GB
⚠️ Tight — reduce context

Adjacent comparisons