Is gemma-4-12B-it-Tachibana-Agent or gemma-4-E4B-it smaller?

gemma-4-E4B-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.64 GiB against 6.87 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-E4B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-12B-it-Tachibana-Agent vs gemma-4-E4B-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-E4B-it is the smaller download — 4,977,171,584 bytes against 7,381,383,520. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-E4B-it's KV cache at 32K is 4.9× 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-Tachibana-Agent	gemma-4-E4B-it
Parameters	12.0B	8.0B
Architecture	gemma4	gemma4
Layers	48	42
Native context	262,144	131,072
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	35	36
Smallest quantization	2.78 GiB	3.30 GiB
Q4_K_M	6.87 GiB	4.64 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-12B-it-Tachibana-Agent	gemma-4-E4B-it	Ratio
4,096	0.72 GiB	0.12 GiB	5.84×
8,192	0.97 GiB	0.18 GiB	5.45×
16,384	1.47 GiB	0.29 GiB	5.12×
32,768	2.47 GiB	0.51 GiB	4.88×
65,536	4.47 GiB	0.94 GiB	4.74×
131,072	8.47 GiB	1.82 GiB	4.66×