Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Gemma 4 12B
53
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
66
Verified leaderboard positions: Gemma 4 12B unranked · Qwen3.6-35B-A3B #27
Pick Qwen3.6-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
Coding
+5.1 difference
Knowledge
+17.3 difference
Multimodal
+7.0 difference
Gemma 4 12B
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
256K
262K
Pick Qwen3.6-35B-A3B if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Gemma 4 12B only becomes the better choice if knowledge is the priority.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 66 to 53. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B's sharpest advantage is in multimodal & grounded, where it averages 76.1 against 69.1. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 72% to 80.4%. Gemma 4 12B does hit back in knowledge, so the answer changes if that is the part of the workload you care about most.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B gives you the larger context window at 262K, compared with 256K for Gemma 4 12B.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 66 to 53. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 72% and 80.4%.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 77.8 versus 60.5. Inside this category, MMLU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Gemma 4 12B has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 72 versus 66.9. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Qwen3.6-35B-A3B has the edge for multimodal and grounded tasks in this comparison, averaging 76.1 versus 69.1. Inside this category, MMMU-Pro is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
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