Is gemma-4-12B-it-assistant or Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct smaller?

gemma-4-12B-it-assistant is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.30 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-12B-it-assistant — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-12B-it-assistant vs Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-12B-it-assistant is the smaller download — 327,221,728 bytes against 807,690,688. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-12B-it-assistant's KV cache at 32K is 3.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-12B-it-assistant	Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct
Parameters	423M	1.2B
Architecture	gemma4-assistant	llama
Layers	4	16
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	2	39
Smallest quantization	0.30 GiB	0.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.30 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	—

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-12B-it-assistant	Llama-3.2-1B-Instruct	Ratio
4,096	0.07 GiB	0.13 GiB	1.88×
8,192	0.10 GiB	0.25 GiB	2.56×
16,384	0.16 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.12×
32,768	0.29 GiB	1.00 GiB	3.51×
65,536	0.54 GiB	2.00 GiB	3.74×
131,072	1.04 GiB	4.00 GiB	3.86×