Is Falcon3-1B-Instruct or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

gemma-3-1b-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.75 GiB against 0.98 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 15.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Falcon3-1B-Instruct vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-3-1b-it is the smaller download — 806,058,240 bytes against 1,057,044,608. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 15.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Falcon3-1B-Instruct	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	1.7B	1000M
Architecture	llama	gemma3
Layers	18	26
Native context	8,192	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	30	28
Smallest quantization	0.21 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.98 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	other	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Falcon3-1B-Instruct	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.28 GiB	0.04 GiB	7.58×
8,192	0.56 GiB	0.05 GiB	10.67×
16,384	1.13 GiB	0.08 GiB	13.40×
32,768	2.25 GiB	0.15 GiB	15.36×
65,536	4.50 GiB	0.27 GiB	16.58×
131,072	9.00 GiB	0.52 GiB	17.26×