gemma-4-12B-it: hardware requirements
gemma-4-12B-it needs about 9.4 GB of memory at Q4 quantization — a 7.1 GB download plus room for context and overhead. That fits a machine with 16GB RAM.
Parameters
12B
Tier
Runs on a laptop
Licence
apache-2.0
Released
2026-03-02
Will it run on your machine?
8GB RAMNot enough memory16GB RAMRuns well32GB RAMRuns well64GB RAMRuns well128GB RAMRuns well8GB VRAMNot enough memory12GB VRAMRuns well16GB VRAMRuns well24GB VRAMRuns well32GB VRAMRuns well
Download sizes by quantization
Lower quantization means a smaller file and less memory, at some cost to quality. Q4_K_M is the usual starting point. What is this?
| Quant | Download | RAM @ 4K | RAM @ 32K | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q4_K_Mrecommended | 7.1 GB | 9.4 GB | 21 GB | measured |
| Q5_K_M | 8.4 GB | 11 GB | 22 GB | measured |
| Q6_K | 9.8 GB | 12 GB | 24 GB | measured |
| Q8_0 | 13 GB | 16 GB | 27 GB | measured |
| BF16 | 25 GB | 29 GB | 40 GB | measured |
“Measured” sizes are read from published GGUF files (unsloth/gemma-4-12b-it-GGUF). “Estimated” sizes are derived from the parameter count and are typically within a few percent. The RAM columns add the context cache and runtime overhead to the download size.