Gemma 3 12B vs Gemma 2 9B
Architecture Comparison
SpecGemma 3 12BGemma 2 9B
TypeDENSEDENSE
Total Parameters12B9.2B
Active Parameters12B9.2B
Layers4842
Hidden Dimension3,0723,584
Attention Heads3216
KV Heads168
Context Length131,0728,192
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Memory Requirements
PrecisionGemma 3 12BGemma 2 9B
BF16 Weights24.0 GB18.4 GB
FP8 Weights12.0 GB9.2 GB
INT4 Weights6.0 GB4.6 GB
KV-Cache / Token393216 B344064 B
Activation Estimate1.00 GB1.00 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXM1 GPU1 GPU
L40S1 GPU1 GPU
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkGemma 3 12BGemma 2 9B
Overall7168
MMLU74.071.3
HumanEval44.040.0
GSM8K78.076.0
MT-Bench80.078.0
Gemma 3 12B
MMLU
74.0
HumanEval
44.0
GSM8K
78.0
MT-Bench
80.0
Gemma 2 9B
MMLU
71.3
HumanEval
40.0
GSM8K
76.0
MT-Bench
78.0
Capabilities
FeatureGemma 3 12BGemma 2 9B
Tool Use✓ Yes✗ No
Vision✓ Yes✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✗ No✗ No
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes
API Pricing Comparison
Cheapest Output (Gemma 3 12B)
$0.10/M
Input: $0.05/M
Cheapest Output (Gemma 2 9B)
$0.10/M
Input: $0.10/M
| Provider | Gemma 3 12B In $/M | Out $/M | Gemma 2 9B In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0.05 | $0.10 | — | — | |
| deepinfra | — | — | $0.10 | $0.10 |
| together | $0.15 | $0.15 | $0.20 | $0.20 |
Recommendation Summary
- ‣Gemma 3 12B scores higher on overall quality (71 vs 68).
- ‣Gemma 2 9B has a smaller memory footprint (18.4 GB vs 24.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
- ‣Gemma 3 12B supports a longer context window (131,072 vs 8,192 tokens).
- ‣Gemma 3 12B is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 44.0 vs 40.0).
- ‣Gemma 3 12B is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 78.0 vs 76.0).