Is gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

Both publish quantizations; compare the table for the exact sizes.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant vs gemma-3-1b-it

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 1.9× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	423M	1000M
Architecture	gemma4-assistant	gemma3
Layers	4	26
Native context	262,144	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	3	28
Smallest quantization	0.30 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	—	0.75 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-12B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized-assistant	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.07 GiB	0.04 GiB	1.79×
8,192	0.10 GiB	0.05 GiB	1.85×
16,384	0.16 GiB	0.08 GiB	1.91×
32,768	0.29 GiB	0.15 GiB	1.95×
65,536	0.54 GiB	0.27 GiB	1.97×
131,072	1.04 GiB	0.52 GiB	1.99×