This is a submission for the Gemma 4 Challenge: Write About Gemma 4
TL;DR: You don't need an RTX 5090 or a cloud budget. This guide shows you how to run Google's Gemma 4 on a stock i5 CPU with 16GB RAM — using Rust, AVX2, quantization, TurboQuant KV compression, and thread pinning.
What Gemma 4 Actually Is
Before we talk about running it, you need to understand what you're actually running — because Gemma 4 is not one model.
Google's official model overview describes it as a family of three distinct architectures, each designed for a different hardware reality:
