Is gemma-3-4b-it-qat or Qwen3-8B smaller?

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

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-4b-it-qat — its KV cache at 32K context is 5.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-3-4b-it-qat vs Qwen3-8B

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-4b-it-qat's KV cache at 32K is 5.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-3-4b-it-qat	Qwen3-8B
Parameters	3.9B	8.2B
Architecture	gemma3	qwen3
Layers	34	36
Native context	131,072	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	1	51
Smallest quantization	2.35 GiB	2.12 GiB
Q4_K_M	—	4.68 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-3-4b-it-qat	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.56 GiB	2.27×
8,192	0.33 GiB	1.13 GiB	3.45×
16,384	0.48 GiB	2.25 GiB	4.66×
32,768	0.79 GiB	4.50 GiB	5.66×
65,536	1.42 GiB	9.00 GiB	6.34×
131,072	2.67 GiB	18.00 GiB	6.74×