Is Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash or gemma-3-1b-it smaller?

Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash is smaller at Q4_K_M: 0.36 GiB against 0.75 GiB.

Which uses less memory at long context?

gemma-3-1b-it — its KV cache at 32K context is 1.5x smaller, because of how its attention layers cache.

Model comparison

Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash vs gemma-3-1b-it

At Q4_K_M, Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash is the smaller download — 381,456,064 bytes against 806,058,240. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-1b-it's KV cache at 32K is 1.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.

From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer

Side by side

	Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash	gemma-3-1b-it
Parameters	634M	1000M
Architecture	dflash	gemma3
Layers	6	26
Native context	262,144	32,768
Mixture of experts	no	no
Quantizations published	8	28
Smallest quantization	0.23 GiB	0.52 GiB
Q4_K_M	0.36 GiB	0.75 GiB
Licence	apache-2.0	gemma

KV cache by context

the term that decides long-context viability

Context	Qwen3.5-4B-DFlash	gemma-3-1b-it	Ratio
4,096	0.09 GiB	0.04 GiB	2.53×
8,192	0.12 GiB	0.05 GiB	2.26×
16,384	0.15 GiB	0.08 GiB	1.79×
32,768	0.21 GiB	0.15 GiB	1.45×
65,536	0.34 GiB	0.27 GiB	1.24×
131,072	0.59 GiB	0.52 GiB	1.13×