Gemma 3 4B Instruct on an H200 141GB (SXM)
Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 128k tokens of context.
Verdict
Fits at FP16
129.7 GiB usable of 141 GB
Weights (Q4_K_M)
2.4 GiB
8.0 GiB at FP16 · 4.3B params · 1 of 6 quant rows are measured files
KV cache
136.0 KiB per token at FP16
34 layers × 4 KV heads × 256 dimensions
Speed ceiling
540 tok/s
4800 GB/s ÷ bytes read per token
Every quant, against this card
Weight bytes are the size of the real published file wherever one exists — 1 of these6 rows are measured from the published checkpoint, the rest computed from the parameter count. Max context is what the KV cache can grow to in whatever memory the weights leave behind, capped at the 128k tokens this model was trained to address.
| Precision | Bits/weight | Weights | Source | Fits | Max context | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FP16 / BF16 | 16.00 | 8.0 GiB | measured file | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 540 tok/s |
| Q8_0 | 8.50 | 4.3 GiB | nominal | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 988 tok/s |
| Q6_K | 6.56 | 3.3 GiB | nominal | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 1258 tok/s |
| Q5_K_M | 5.67 | 2.8 GiB | nominal | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 1438 tok/s |
| Q4_K_M | 4.83 | 2.4 GiB | nominal | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 1663 tok/s |
| Q3_K_M | 3.91 | 2.0 GiB | nominal | yes | 131,072 (model cap) | 2007 tok/s |
What the context actually costs
The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim bytes per token per element — 2 · 34 · 4 · 256 · 2 B = 136.0 KiB. It depends on the key/value head count, not the attention-head count and not the parameter count. This model shares 4 KV heads across 8 query heads, which divides the cache by 2 against multi-head attention.
Sliding-window attention. 29 of this model's 34 layers attend to a 1,024-token window and stop growing there; only the remaining 5 keep scaling with context. That is why the cache figures below flatten out — and why a calculator that ignores the layer pattern over-states this model's long-context footprint several times over.
| Context | KV cache (FP16) | KV cache (8-bit) | Plus Q4_K_M weights |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4,096 | 196 MiB | 98 MiB | 2.6 GiB |
| 8,192 | 276 MiB | 138 MiB | 2.7 GiB |
| 32,768 | 756 MiB | 378 MiB | 3.2 GiB |
| 131,072 | 2.6 GiB | 1.3 GiB | 5.0 GiB |
The speed ceiling, and where it comes from
Generating one token reads every active weight from memory once. At FP16 / BF16 that is 8.0 GiB, plus a pass over the KV cache. An H200 141GB (SXM) moves 4800 GB/s, so the arithmetic ceiling is 540 tok/s. Treat it as a bound, not an estimate: attention overhead, kernel launches and imperfect memory access keep real runtimes at roughly 60–80% of it, and nothing pushes past it.
Where these numbers come from
The model
- Parameters
- 4,300,079,472
- Layers
- 34
- Attention / KV heads
- 8 / 4
- Head dimension
- 256
- Trained context
- 131,072
- Checkpoint as published
- 8.0 GiB
Read from unsloth/gemma-3-4b-it — an ungated mirror of google/gemma-3-4b-it, whose own config cannot be fetched without an access token. The parameter count is the Hub's own total over the tensor shapes, not a figure taken from the model's name.
The accelerator
- Memory
- 141 GB HBM3e
- Bandwidth
- 4800 GB/s
- Assumed usable
- 92% → 129.7 GiB
Capacity and bandwidth from the vendor's specification. The usable fraction is an assumption, not a spec: a driver context, compute workspace and any attached display come out of the same pool before a weight is loaded.
Questions this pairing answers
How much VRAM does Gemma 3 4B Instruct need?
8.0 GiB for the weights at FP16 — 4.3B parameters at two bytes each — and 2.4 GiB at Q4_K_M. The KV cache is on top of that and is not a fixed number: this model spends 136.0 KiB per token of context on its full-attention layers, so 8,192 tokens costs a further 276 MiB. An H200 141GB (SXM) makes 129.7 GiB of its 141 GB available on the assumption below.
Can an H200 141GB (SXM) run Gemma 3 4B Instruct?
Yes — the unquantized weights fit with room for 128k tokens of context. That is the weights and the KV cache together, against 129.7 GiB of usable memory.
How fast will Gemma 3 4B Instruct run on an H200 141GB (SXM)?
No faster than 540 tokens/second at FP16 / BF16, and in practice below it. Decoding is memory-bound: every token reads all 8.0 GiB of weights plus the cache, and this card moves 4800 GB/s. That division is the ceiling — no kernel, runtime or driver beats it, and a real runtime typically reaches 60–80% of it.
Why does the context length change how much memory Gemma 3 4B Instruct needs?
Because the KV cache holds one key and one value vector per token, per layer, for the whole conversation, and it is allocated separately from the weights. This model has 34 layers and 4 key/value heads of 256 dimensions, shared across 8 query heads — grouped-query attention, which divides the cache by 2. That works out at 136.0 KiB per token, except that 29 of the 34 layers use a 1024-token sliding window and stop growing there. Parameter count tells you nothing about this number.
The same model on a different card
- Apple M4 Max (128GB)FP16 / BF16
- A100 80GB (SXM)FP16 / BF16
- H100 80GB (SXM5)FP16 / BF16
- Jetson AGX Orin (64GB)FP16 / BF16
- RTX 6000 Ada GenerationFP16 / BF16
- L40SFP16 / BF16
- Apple M4 Pro (48GB)FP16 / BF16
- A100 40GB (SXM)FP16 / BF16
A different model on the same card
All 62 models on H200 141GB (SXM) →- Nanbeige4.2 3BFP16 / BF16
- Qwen3 4BFP16 / BF16
- Phi-4-mini 3.8B InstructFP16 / BF16
- Phi-3.5-mini 3.8B InstructFP16 / BF16
- Llama 3.2 3B InstructFP16 / BF16
- Qwen2.5 3B InstructFP16 / BF16
- Qwen3 1.7BFP16 / BF16
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen 1.5BFP16 / BF16
Method and limits. Weight bytes are the byte size of the real published file wherever one exists, and the model's exact parameter count times the published llama.cpp bits-per-weight where it does not. That distinction is on every row above and it matters at both ends: a sub-1B model's Q4_K_M file runs a third larger than the nominal figure because k-quants keep its embedding tables at higher precision, and an already-4-bit release cannot be quantized upward at all. The KV cache is 2 · layers · kv_heads · head_dim · bytes per token, summed over layers with each sliding-window layer capped at its window. The speed figure is a roofline bound, not a benchmark: bandwidth divided by bytes read per token, which no runtime exceeds and every runtime falls short of. The usable fraction of card memory is an assumption: 92% here, which is what this lane assumes for a dedicated card — the other class assumes 75%, so it is not one number applied to every device. That is the only assumed input on this page; every other figure is computed from the model config and the card's published specification. Nothing on this page is written by a language model. Architecture from the model's published config, fetched 2026-08-07. This checkpoint also carries a vision tower; its parameters are inside the totals above because they load whether or not you send it an image.