Is Qwen3-4B or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

gemma-3-1b-it is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.75 GiB against 2.33 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 30.7x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3-4B vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, gemma-3-1b-it is the smaller download — 806,058,240 bytes against 2,497,280,256. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 30.7× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3-4B	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	4.0B	1000M
Architecture	qwen3	gemma3
Layers	36	26
Native context	40,960	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	29	28
Smallest quantization	1.01 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	2.33 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	—	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3-4B	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.56 GiB	0.04 GiB	15.16×
8,192	1.13 GiB	0.05 GiB	21.33×
16,384	2.25 GiB	0.08 GiB	26.79×
32,768	4.50 GiB	0.15 GiB	30.72×
65,536	9.00 GiB	0.27 GiB	33.15×
131,072	18.00 GiB	0.52 GiB	34.52×