Llama 3.1 8B vs Mistral Large 2
Architecture Comparison
SpecLlama 3.1 8BMistral Large 2
TypeDENSEDENSE
Total Parameters8.03B123B
Active Parameters8.03B123B
Layers3288
Hidden Dimension4,09612,288
Attention Heads3296
KV Heads88
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Memory Requirements
PrecisionLlama 3.1 8BMistral Large 2
BF16 Weights16.1 GB246.0 GB
FP8 Weights8.0 GB123.0 GB
INT4 Weights4.0 GB61.5 GB
KV-Cache / Token131072 B360448 B
Activation Estimate1.00 GB3.50 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXM1 GPU4 GPUs
L40S1 GPU7 GPUs
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkLlama 3.1 8BMistral Large 2
Overall6582
MMLU69.484.0
HumanEval40.253.0
GSM8K79.691.2
MT-Bench78.084.0
Llama 3.1 8B
MMLU
69.4
HumanEval
40.2
GSM8K
79.6
MT-Bench
78.0
Mistral Large 2
MMLU
84.0
HumanEval
53.0
GSM8K
91.2
MT-Bench
84.0
Capabilities
FeatureLlama 3.1 8BMistral Large 2
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✗ No✗ No
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes
API Pricing Comparison
Cheapest Output (Llama 3.1 8B)
$0.08/M
Input: $0.05/M
Cheapest Output (Mistral Large 2)
$2.50/M
Input: $2.50/M
| Provider | Llama 3.1 8B In $/M | Out $/M | Mistral Large 2 In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| groq | $0.05 | $0.08 | — | — |
| together | $0.18 | $0.18 | $2.50 | $2.50 |
| fireworks | $0.20 | $0.20 | — | — |
| mistral | — | — | $2.00 | $6.00 |
Recommendation Summary
- ‣Mistral Large 2 scores higher on overall quality (82 vs 65).
- ‣Llama 3.1 8B is cheaper per output token ($0.08/M vs $2.50/M).
- ‣Llama 3.1 8B has a smaller memory footprint (16.1 GB vs 246.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
- ‣Mistral Large 2 is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 53.0 vs 40.2).
- ‣Mistral Large 2 is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 91.2 vs 79.6).