Is gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated or Qwen3.5-9B smaller?

Qwen3.5-9B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 5.24 GiB against 6.80 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3.5-9B — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated vs Qwen3.5-9B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-9B is the smaller download — 5,627,044,256 bytes against 7,300,778,336. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3.5-9B's KV cache at 32K is 2.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated	Qwen3.5-9B
Parameters	12.2B	9.7B
Architecture	gemma3	qwen35
Layers	48	32
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	38	34
Smallest quantization	3.58 GiB	2.97 GiB
Q4_K_M	6.80 GiB	5.24 GiB
Licence	gemma	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-3-12b-it-abliterated	Qwen3.5-9B	Ratio
4,096	0.72 GiB	0.13 GiB	5.75×
8,192	0.97 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.87×
16,384	1.47 GiB	0.50 GiB	2.94×
32,768	2.47 GiB	1.00 GiB	2.47×
65,536	4.47 GiB	2.00 GiB	2.23×
131,072	8.47 GiB	4.00 GiB	2.12×