Is gemma-4-12B-it or T-Search smaller?

gemma-4-12B-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 6.63 GiB against 20.36 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

T-Search — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.9x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-12B-it vs T-Search

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-12B-it is the smaller download — 7,121,861,440 bytes against 21,864,081,248. At long context the gap widens: T-Search's KV cache at 32K is 3.9× 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	T-Search
Parameters	12.0B	36.0B
Architecture	gemma4	qwen35moe
Layers	48	40
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	yes, 256 experts
Quantizations published	59	26
Smallest quantization	3.92 GiB	9.55 GiB
Q4_K_M	6.63 GiB	20.36 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-12B-it	T-Search	Ratio
4,096	0.72 GiB	0.08 GiB	9.19×
8,192	0.97 GiB	0.16 GiB	6.20×
16,384	1.47 GiB	0.31 GiB	4.70×
32,768	2.47 GiB	0.63 GiB	3.95×
65,536	4.47 GiB	1.25 GiB	3.57×
131,072	8.47 GiB	2.50 GiB	3.39×