Is gemma-4-12B-it or pixtral-12b smaller?

gemma-4-12B-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 6.63 GiB against 6.96 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-12B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 2.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-12B-it vs pixtral-12b

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-12B-it is the smaller download — 7,121,861,440 bytes against 7,477,204,608. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-12B-it's KV cache at 32K is 2.0× 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	pixtral-12b
Parameters	12.0B	12.7B
Architecture	gemma4	llama
Layers	48	40
Native context	262,144	1,024,000
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	59	32
Smallest quantization	3.92 GiB	3.85 GiB
Q4_K_M	6.63 GiB	6.96 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-12B-it	pixtral-12b	Ratio
4,096	0.72 GiB	0.63 GiB	1.15×
8,192	0.97 GiB	1.25 GiB	1.29×
16,384	1.47 GiB	2.50 GiB	1.70×
32,768	2.47 GiB	5.00 GiB	2.03×
65,536	4.47 GiB	10.00 GiB	2.24×
131,072	8.47 GiB	20.00 GiB	2.36×