Is gemma-4-26B-A4B-it or gemma-4-31B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized smaller?

Both publish quantizations; compare the table for the exact sizes.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-26B-A4B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.0x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-26B-A4B-it vs gemma-4-31B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized

These two publish different quantization sets; the table below has the exact sizes. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-26B-A4B-it's KV cache at 32K is 4.0× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-26B-A4B-it	gemma-4-31B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized
Parameters	26.5B	32.7B
Architecture	gemma4	gemma4
Layers	30	60
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 128 experts	no
Quantizations published	46	1
Smallest quantization	8.99 GiB	16.44 GiB
Q4_K_M	15.64 GiB	—
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-26B-A4B-it	gemma-4-31B-it-qat-q4_0-unquantized	Ratio
4,096	0.45 GiB	1.80 GiB	4.00×
8,192	0.61 GiB	2.42 GiB	4.00×
16,384	0.92 GiB	3.67 GiB	4.00×
32,768	1.54 GiB	6.17 GiB	4.00×
65,536	2.79 GiB	11.17 GiB	4.00×
131,072	5.29 GiB	21.17 GiB	4.00×