Is TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3 or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.62 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3 vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3 is the smaller download — 667,822,976 bytes against 806,058,240. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 4.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	1.1B	1000M
Architecture	llama	gemma3
Layers	22	26
Native context	2,048	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	12	28
Smallest quantization	0.45 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.62 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	TinyLlama-1.1B-Chat-v0.3	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.09 GiB	0.04 GiB	2.32×
8,192	0.17 GiB	0.05 GiB	3.26×
16,384	0.34 GiB	0.08 GiB	4.09×
32,768	0.69 GiB	0.15 GiB	4.69×
65,536	1.38 GiB	0.27 GiB	5.06×
131,072	2.75 GiB	0.52 GiB	5.27×