Is gemma-3-270m or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

gemma-3-270m is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.47 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-270m — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.4x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-3-270m vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-3-270m is the smaller download — 506,228,096 bytes against 806,058,240. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-270m's KV cache at 32K is 1.4× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-3-270m	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	268M	1000M
Architecture	gemma3	gemma3
Layers	18	26
Native context	32,768	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	30	28
Smallest quantization	0.22 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.47 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	gemma	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-3-270m	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.03 GiB	0.04 GiB	1.41×
8,192	0.04 GiB	0.05 GiB	1.38×
16,384	0.06 GiB	0.08 GiB	1.37×
32,768	0.11 GiB	0.15 GiB	1.35×
65,536	0.20 GiB	0.27 GiB	1.34×
131,072	0.39 GiB	0.52 GiB	1.34×