Is Barcenas-E2B or gemma-4-E4B-it smaller?

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

Which uses less memory at long context?

Barcenas-E2B — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Barcenas-E2B vs gemma-4-E4B-it

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: Barcenas-E2B's KV cache at 32K is 2.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Barcenas-E2B	gemma-4-E4B-it
Parameters	5.1B	8.0B
Architecture	gemma4	gemma4
Layers	35	42
Native context	131,072	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	15	36
Smallest quantization	2.78 GiB	3.30 GiB
Q4_K_M	—	4.64 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Barcenas-E2B	gemma-4-E4B-it	Ratio
4,096	0.05 GiB	0.12 GiB	2.25×
8,192	0.08 GiB	0.18 GiB	2.17×
16,384	0.14 GiB	0.29 GiB	2.10×
32,768	0.25 GiB	0.51 GiB	2.06×
65,536	0.46 GiB	0.94 GiB	2.03×
131,072	0.90 GiB	1.82 GiB	2.02×