@analogalok: i just ran Google's brand new Unsloth Gemma4 12B dense GGUF on my RTX 4060 using llama.cpp + CUDA 13.2 21 tokens per se…
Summary
Google's new Gemma 4 12B is a single decoder-only transformer with encoder-free multimodal input, achieving strong benchmarks while being small enough to run locally on a budget GPU. It is released under Apache 2.0 license.
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Cached at: 06/03/26, 11:56 PM
i just ran Google’s brand new Unsloth Gemma4 12B dense GGUF on my RTX 4060 using llama.cpp + CUDA 13.2
21 tokens per second. on a budget consumer GPU. locally.
no API. no cloud. no subscription.
and the benchmarks are absolutely cooked
first let’s talk architecture because this is genuinely different
every multimodal model you’ve used has a frozen vision encoder + frozen audio encoder + LLM backbone glued together
Gemma 4 12B is different
it’s a single decoder only transformer. that’s it. vision? raw 48×48 pixel patches → one matmul → projected directly into the LLM
audio? raw 16kHz signal sliced into 40ms frames → linear projection → same LLM input space
no encoder tax. no latency penalty. no fragmented memory
to put the encoder savings in perspective:
old Gemma 4 26B approach:
- 550M param vision encoder (frozen)
- 300M param audio encoder (frozen)
- LLM backbone
Gemma 4 12B:
- 35M param vision embedder (a single matmul)
- no audio encoder at all
- LLM backbone handles EVERYTHING 550M → 35M for vision alone. that’s a 15x reduction
this is why the gemma-4-12b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf is just 6.6 GBs!!!
and it has 256K native context context
Benchmarks:
AIME 2026 (math olympiad): 77.5% GPQA Diamond (expert science): 78.8% LiveCodeBench v6 (real code): 72% Codeforces ELO: 1659 MMLU Pro: 77.2% MATH-Vision: 79.7% BigBench Extra Hard: 53%
inference → llama.cpp, LM Studio, vLLM, SGLang
llamacpp flags:
-m “gemma-4-12b-it-Q4_K_M.gguf” -ngl 99 -c 8000 -v –port 8080
Available on huggingface now! Link below
Huggingface Unsloth GGUF Link:
Revolutionary architecture. No dedicated encoders for vision and audio.
Benchmarks
Agentic coding review and comparison drops soon
I couldn’t agree less. Benchmarks are just screenshots and high throughput is useless unless the tokens it generates are high quality. Agentic coding review and comparison drops soon.
Open source AI will win!
Absolutely! Agentic coding tests dropping soon! Stay tuned
Thanks!
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