Gemma 3 27B vs Llama 3.1 70B
Architecture Comparison
SpecGemma 3 27BLlama 3.1 70B
TypeDENSEDENSE
Total Parameters27B70.6B
Active Parameters27B70.6B
Layers6280
Hidden Dimension3,5848,192
Attention Heads3264
KV Heads168
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Memory Requirements
PrecisionGemma 3 27BLlama 3.1 70B
BF16 Weights54.0 GB141.2 GB
FP8 Weights27.0 GB70.6 GB
INT4 Weights13.5 GB35.3 GB
KV-Cache / Token507904 B327680 B
Activation Estimate1.50 GB2.50 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXM1 GPU3 GPUs
L40S2 GPUs4 GPUs
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkGemma 3 27BLlama 3.1 70B
Overall7682
MMLU78.083.6
HumanEval48.058.5
GSM8K85.093.0
MT-Bench82.085.0
Gemma 3 27B
MMLU
78.0
HumanEval
48.0
GSM8K
85.0
MT-Bench
82.0
Llama 3.1 70B
MMLU
83.6
HumanEval
58.5
GSM8K
93.0
MT-Bench
85.0
Capabilities
FeatureGemma 3 27BLlama 3.1 70B
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✓ Yes✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✗ No✗ No
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes
API Pricing Comparison
Cheapest Output (Gemma 3 27B)
$0.20/M
Input: $0.10/M
Cheapest Output (Llama 3.1 70B)
$0.79/M
Input: $0.59/M
| Provider | Gemma 3 27B In $/M | Out $/M | Llama 3.1 70B In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0.10 | $0.20 | — | — | |
| together | $0.30 | $0.30 | $0.88 | $0.88 |
| groq | — | — | $0.59 | $0.79 |
| fireworks | — | — | $0.90 | $0.90 |
Recommendation Summary
- ‣Llama 3.1 70B scores higher on overall quality (82 vs 76).
- ‣Gemma 3 27B is cheaper per output token ($0.20/M vs $0.79/M).
- ‣Gemma 3 27B has a smaller memory footprint (54.0 GB vs 141.2 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
- ‣Llama 3.1 70B is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 58.5 vs 48.0).
- ‣Llama 3.1 70B is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 93.0 vs 85.0).