DeepSeek R1 vs DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B

DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek · 671B params · Quality: 92

DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B

DeepSeek · 70.6B params · Quality: 50

Architecture Comparison

SpecDeepSeek R1DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
TypeMOEDENSE
Total Parameters671B70.6B
Active Parameters37B70.6B
Layers6180
Hidden Dimension7,1688,192
Attention Heads12864
KV Heads18
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Total Experts256N/A
Active Experts8N/A

Memory Requirements

PrecisionDeepSeek R1DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
BF16 Weights1342.0 GB141.2 GB
FP8 Weights671.0 GB70.6 GB
INT4 Weights335.5 GB35.3 GB
KV-Cache / Token31232 B327680 B
Activation Estimate3.00 GB2.50 GB

Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)

H100 SXMN/A3 GPUs
L40SN/A4 GPUs

Quality Benchmarks

BenchmarkDeepSeek R1DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
Overall9250
MMLU90.8N/A
HumanEval71.7N/A
GSM8K97.3N/A
MT-Bench89.0N/A

DeepSeek R1

MMLU
90.8
HumanEval
71.7
GSM8K
97.3
MT-Bench
89.0

DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B

Capabilities

FeatureDeepSeek R1DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✓ Yes✓ Yes
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes

API Pricing Comparison

Cheapest Output (DeepSeek R1)

$2.19/M

Input: $0.55/M

Cheapest Output (DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B)

$0.88/M

Input: $0.88/M

ProviderDeepSeek R1 In $/MOut $/MDeepSeek R1 Distill 70B In $/MOut $/M
together$3.00$7.00$0.88$0.88
fireworks——$0.90$0.90
deepseek$0.55$2.19——

Recommendation Summary

  • ‣DeepSeek R1 scores higher on overall quality (92 vs 50).
  • ‣DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B is cheaper per output token ($0.88/M vs $2.19/M).
  • ‣DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B has a smaller memory footprint (141.2 GB vs 1342.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
  • ‣DeepSeek R1 uses MOE architecture while DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B uses DENSE. MoE models activate fewer parameters per token, improving inference efficiency.
Calculate ROI for DeepSeek R1→Calculate ROI for DeepSeek R1 Distill 70B→

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