Is gemma-4-E2B-it or Qwen3.5-9B smaller?

gemma-4-E2B-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 2.89 GiB against 5.24 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-E2B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 4.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-4-E2B-it vs Qwen3.5-9B

At Q4_K_M, gemma-4-E2B-it is the smaller download — 3,106,738,272 bytes against 5,627,044,256. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-E2B-it's KV cache at 32K is 4.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-4-E2B-it	Qwen3.5-9B
Parameters	5.1B	9.7B
Architecture	gemma4	qwen35
Layers	35	32
Native context	131,072	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	54	34
Smallest quantization	2.13 GiB	2.97 GiB
Q4_K_M	2.89 GiB	5.24 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-4-E2B-it	Qwen3.5-9B	Ratio
4,096	0.05 GiB	0.13 GiB	2.29×
8,192	0.08 GiB	0.25 GiB	3.05×
16,384	0.14 GiB	0.50 GiB	3.66×
32,768	0.25 GiB	1.00 GiB	4.06×
65,536	0.46 GiB	2.00 GiB	4.30×
131,072	0.90 GiB	4.00 GiB	4.43×