Qwen 3 8B vs Gemma 3 12B
Architecture Comparison
SpecQwen 3 8BGemma 3 12B
TypeDENSEDENSE
Total Parameters8.2B12B
Active Parameters8.2B12B
Layers3648
Hidden Dimension4,0963,072
Attention Heads3232
KV Heads816
Context Length131,072131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Memory Requirements
PrecisionQwen 3 8BGemma 3 12B
BF16 Weights16.4 GB24.0 GB
FP8 Weights8.2 GB12.0 GB
INT4 Weights4.1 GB6.0 GB
KV-Cache / Token147456 B393216 B
Activation Estimate1.00 GB1.00 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXM1 GPU1 GPU
L40S1 GPU1 GPU
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkQwen 3 8BGemma 3 12B
Overall6771
MMLU72.074.0
HumanEval42.044.0
GSM8K78.078.0
MT-Bench77.080.0
Qwen 3 8B
MMLU
72.0
HumanEval
42.0
GSM8K
78.0
MT-Bench
77.0
Gemma 3 12B
MMLU
74.0
HumanEval
44.0
GSM8K
78.0
MT-Bench
80.0
Capabilities
FeatureQwen 3 8BGemma 3 12B
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✓ Yes
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✓ Yes✗ No
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes
API Pricing Comparison
Cheapest Output (Qwen 3 8B)
$0.20/M
Input: $0.20/M
Cheapest Output (Gemma 3 12B)
$0.10/M
Input: $0.05/M
| Provider | Qwen 3 8B In $/M | Out $/M | Gemma 3 12B In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| — | — | $0.05 | $0.10 | |
| together | $0.20 | $0.20 | $0.15 | $0.15 |
| fireworks | $0.20 | $0.20 | — | — |
Recommendation Summary
- ‣Gemma 3 12B scores higher on overall quality (71 vs 67).
- ‣Gemma 3 12B is cheaper per output token ($0.10/M vs $0.20/M).
- ‣Qwen 3 8B has a smaller memory footprint (16.4 GB vs 24.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
- ‣Gemma 3 12B is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 44.0 vs 42.0).