Is gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it or Qwen3.8-27B smaller?

Qwen3.8-27B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 15.66 GiB against 22.25 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.3x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it vs Qwen3.8-27B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.8-27B is the smaller download — 16,810,714,336 bytes against 23,887,604,320. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it's KV cache at 32K is 1.3× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it	Qwen3.8-27B
Parameters	20.5B	27.8B
Architecture	gemma4	qwen35
Layers	30	64
Native context	262,144	262,144
Mixture of experts	yes, 98 experts	no
Quantizations published	23	22
Smallest quantization	7.24 GiB	8.39 GiB
Q4_K_M	22.25 GiB	15.66 GiB
Licence	gemma	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-A4B-98e-v6-coder-it	Qwen3.8-27B	Ratio
4,096	0.45 GiB	0.25 GiB	1.80×
8,192	0.61 GiB	0.50 GiB	1.21×
16,384	0.92 GiB	1.00 GiB	1.09×
32,768	1.54 GiB	2.00 GiB	1.30×
65,536	2.79 GiB	4.00 GiB	1.43×
131,072	5.29 GiB	8.00 GiB	1.51×