Model comparison
Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 vs gemma-4-E4B-it
At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-E4B-it is the smaller download — 4,977,171,584 bytes against 5,198,386,048. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-E4B-it's KV cache at 32K is 8.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.
From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer
Side by side
| Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | gemma-4-E4B-it | |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 8.9B | 8.0B |
| Architecture | mistral3 | gemma4 |
| Layers | 34 | 42 |
| Native context | 262,144 | 131,072 |
| Mixture of experts | no | no |
| Quantizations published | 28 | 36 |
| Smallest quantization | 2.12 GiB | 3.30 GiB |
| Q4_K_M | 4.84 GiB | 4.64 GiB |
| Licence | apache-2.0 | apache-2.0 |
KV cache by context
the term that decides long-context viability
| Context | Ministral-3-8B-Instruct-2512 | gemma-4-E4B-it | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4,096 | 0.53 GiB | 0.12 GiB | 4.32× |
| 8,192 | 1.06 GiB | 0.18 GiB | 5.98× |
| 16,384 | 2.13 GiB | 0.29 GiB | 7.40× |
| 32,768 | 4.25 GiB | 0.51 GiB | 8.40× |
| 65,536 | 8.50 GiB | 0.94 GiB | 9.01× |
| 131,072 | 17.00 GiB | 1.82 GiB | 9.35× |