Is gemma-7b or Qwen3-8B smaller?

Qwen3-8B is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.68 GiB against 4.96 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

Qwen3-8B — its KV cache at 32K context is 3.1x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

gemma-7b vs Qwen3-8B

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3-8B is the smaller download — 5,027,783,488 bytes against 5,329,758,592. At long context the gap widens: Qwen3-8B's KV cache at 32K is 3.1× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	gemma-7b	Qwen3-8B
Parameters	8.5B	8.2B
Architecture	gemma	qwen3
Layers	28	36
Native context	8,192	40,960
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	31	51
Smallest quantization	2.01 GiB	2.12 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.96 GiB	4.68 GiB
Licence	gemma	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	gemma-7b	Qwen3-8B	Ratio
4,096	1.75 GiB	0.56 GiB	3.11×
8,192	3.50 GiB	1.13 GiB	3.11×
16,384	7.00 GiB	2.25 GiB	3.11×
32,768	14.00 GiB	4.50 GiB	3.11×
65,536	28.00 GiB	9.00 GiB	3.11×
131,072	56.00 GiB	18.00 GiB	3.11×