Model comparison
SmolLM2-135M-Instruct vs gemma-3-270m-it
At Q4_K_M, SmolLM2-135M-Instruct is the smaller download — 105,454,144 bytes against 253,115,168. At long context the gap widens: gemma-3-270m-it's KV cache at 32K is 6.5× smaller, which usually matters more than the difference in weights.
From the file· summed bytes, KV per layer
Side by side
| SmolLM2-135M-Instruct | gemma-3-270m-it | |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 135M | 268M |
| Architecture | llama | gemma3 |
| Layers | 30 | 18 |
| Native context | 8,192 | 32,768 |
| Mixture of experts | no | no |
| Quantizations published | 41 | 39 |
| Smallest quantization | 0.08 GiB | 0.17 GiB |
| Q4_K_M | 0.10 GiB | 0.24 GiB |
| Licence | apache-2.0 | gemma |
KV cache by context
the term that decides long-context viability
| Context | SmolLM2-135M-Instruct | gemma-3-270m-it | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4,096 | 0.09 GiB | 0.03 GiB | 3.33× |
| 8,192 | 0.18 GiB | 0.04 GiB | 4.62× |
| 16,384 | 0.35 GiB | 0.06 GiB | 5.71× |
| 32,768 | 0.70 GiB | 0.11 GiB | 6.49× |
| 65,536 | 1.41 GiB | 0.20 GiB | 6.96× |
| 131,072 | 2.81 GiB | 0.39 GiB | 7.22× |