Llama 3.1 405B vs Gemma 3 27B
Architecture Comparison
SpecLlama 3.1 405BGemma 3 27B
TypeDENSEDENSE
Total Parameters405B27B
Active Parameters405B27B
Layers12662
Hidden Dimension16,3843,584
Attention Heads12832
KV Heads816
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Memory Requirements
PrecisionLlama 3.1 405BGemma 3 27B
BF16 Weights810.0 GB54.0 GB
FP8 Weights405.0 GB27.0 GB
INT4 Weights202.5 GB13.5 GB
KV-Cache / Token516096 B507904 B
Activation Estimate5.00 GB1.50 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXMN/A1 GPU
L40SN/A2 GPUs
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkLlama 3.1 405BGemma 3 27B
Overall8876
MMLU88.678.0
HumanEval61.048.0
GSM8K96.885.0
MT-Bench88.082.0
Llama 3.1 405B
MMLU
88.6
HumanEval
61.0
GSM8K
96.8
MT-Bench
88.0
Gemma 3 27B
MMLU
78.0
HumanEval
48.0
GSM8K
85.0
MT-Bench
82.0
Capabilities
FeatureLlama 3.1 405BGemma 3 27B
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✓ Yes
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✗ No✗ No
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes
API Pricing Comparison
Cheapest Output (Llama 3.1 405B)
$3.00/M
Input: $3.00/M
Cheapest Output (Gemma 3 27B)
$0.20/M
Input: $0.10/M
| Provider | Llama 3.1 405B In $/M | Out $/M | Gemma 3 27B In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | $0.10 | $0.20 | |
| together | $3.50 | $3.50 | $0.30 | $0.30 |
| fireworks | $3.00 | $3.00 | — | — |
Recommendation Summary
- ‣Llama 3.1 405B scores higher on overall quality (88 vs 76).
- ‣Gemma 3 27B is cheaper per output token ($0.20/M vs $3.00/M).
- ‣Gemma 3 27B has a smaller memory footprint (54.0 GB vs 810.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
- ‣Llama 3.1 405B is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 61.0 vs 48.0).
- ‣Llama 3.1 405B is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 96.8 vs 85.0).