Is MiniCPM-V-4_5 or gemma-4-12B-it smaller?

MiniCPM-V-4_5 is smaller at Q4_K_M: 4.68 GiB against 6.63 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-4-12B-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.8x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

MiniCPM-V-4_5 vs gemma-4-12B-it

At Q4_K_M, MiniCPM-V-4_5 is the smaller download — 5,026,714,560 bytes against 7,121,861,440. At long context the gap widens: gemma-4-12B-it's KV cache at 32K is 1.8× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	MiniCPM-V-4_5	gemma-4-12B-it
Parameters	8.7B	12.0B
Architecture	qwen3	gemma4
Layers	36	48
Native context	40,960	262,144
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	28	59
Smallest quantization	3.06 GiB	3.92 GiB
Q4_K_M	4.68 GiB	6.63 GiB
Licence	—	apache-2.0

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	MiniCPM-V-4_5	gemma-4-12B-it	Ratio
4,096	0.56 GiB	0.72 GiB	1.28×
8,192	1.13 GiB	0.97 GiB	1.16×
16,384	2.25 GiB	1.47 GiB	1.53×
32,768	4.50 GiB	2.47 GiB	1.82×
65,536	9.00 GiB	4.47 GiB	2.01×
131,072	18.00 GiB	8.47 GiB	2.13×