Is gemma-2-2b-it or Qwen3-4B smaller?

gemma-2-2b-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 1.59 GiB against 2.33 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-2-2b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-2-2b-it vs Qwen3-4B

At Q4_K_M, gemma-2-2b-it is the smaller download — 1,708,582,752 bytes against 2,497,280,256. At long context the gap widens: gemma-2-2b-it's KV cache at 32K is 2.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-2-2b-it	Qwen3-4B
Parameters	2.6B	4.0B
Architecture	gemma2	qwen3
Layers	26	36
Native context	8,192	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	34	29
Smallest quantization	0.78 GiB	1.01 GiB
Q4_K_M	1.59 GiB	2.33 GiB
Licence	gemma	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-2-2b-it	Qwen3-4B	Ratio
4,096	0.41 GiB	0.56 GiB	1.38×
8,192	0.63 GiB	1.13 GiB	1.77×
16,384	1.04 GiB	2.25 GiB	2.16×
32,768	1.85 GiB	4.50 GiB	2.43×
65,536	3.48 GiB	9.00 GiB	2.59×
131,072	6.73 GiB	18.00 GiB	2.68×