Google Gemma 4 QAT Weights Deliver 2x Faster Decoding Than bf16 on AWS SageMaker
A benchmark test on Amazon SageMaker compared Google's Gemma 4 E2B model in two formats — a full-size bf16 checkpoint and a quantization-aware trained (QAT) 4-bit weights version — running on the same NVIDIA L4 GPU instance. The QAT model decoded tokens at 105.1 tokens per second versus 51.3 for bf16, and handled 16 parallel requests at 1,077 tokens per second compared to 619 for the standard version. Both models produced identical results across 40 test questions, indicating no accuracy loss from quantization. The test was conducted on an AWS ml.g6.xlarge instance in the us-east-2 region using a vLLM container, with the only change between runs being the model checkpoint variable. The author also released a suite of Python MCP tools on GitHub to simplify deployment and management of vLLM-hosted models on SageMaker endpoints.
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