Is gemma-3-4b-it or gemma-4-E4B-it smaller?

gemma-3-4b-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 2.32 GiB against 4.64 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-E4B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.6x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-3-4b-it vs gemma-4-E4B-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-3-4b-it is the smaller download — 2,489,757,856 bytes against 4,977,171,584. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-E4B-it's KV cache at 32K is 1.6× 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	gemma-4-E4B-it
Parameters	4.3B	8.0B
Architecture	gemma3	gemma4
Layers	34	42
Native context	131,072	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	28	36
Smallest quantization	1.43 GiB	3.30 GiB
Q4_K_M	2.32 GiB	4.64 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-3-4b-it	gemma-4-E4B-it	Ratio
4,096	0.25 GiB	0.12 GiB	2.02×
8,192	0.33 GiB	0.18 GiB	1.84×
16,384	0.48 GiB	0.29 GiB	1.68×
32,768	0.79 GiB	0.51 GiB	1.57×
65,536	1.42 GiB	0.94 GiB	1.51×
131,072	2.67 GiB	1.82 GiB	1.47×