Claude 3 Sonnet vs Mixtral 8x22B
How do these models stack up? Below is an expert side-by-side comparison of specifications, context window capacity, live pricing per million tokens, and standardized benchmark scores for Claude 3 Sonnet and Mixtral 8x22B.
Claude 3 Sonnet
Claude 3 Sonnet was Anthropic's balanced standard model in the first Claude 3 generation, optimized for a combination of response speed and general-purpose capabilities across writing, summarization, and question answering. Released in March 2024 alongside Opus and Haiku, it occupied the mid-tier positioning in the Claude 3 lineup. Claude 3 Sonnet has since been deprecated, and current use cases requiring similar capability-to-cost balance are best served by the Claude 4 Sonnet series, which offers substantially improved reasoning, context handling, and instruction following at competitive pricing.
Mixtral 8x22B
Mixtral 8x22B is Mistral AI's open-weight Mixture-of-Experts model, activating only 39B of its 141B total parameters per token to deliver frontier-level performance at inference costs comparable to a much smaller dense model. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, Mixtral 8x22B is one of the most capable fully open-weight models available, with strong multilingual performance, robust coding ability, and efficient fine-tuning via LoRA. It is widely deployed across self-hosted infrastructure, including Ollama, vLLM, and Hugging Face TGI.
Technical Specifications
| Specification | Claude 3 Sonnet | Mixtral 8x22B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Anthropic | Mistral |
| Context Window | 200,000 tokens | 65,536 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | N/A | 87/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | N/A | 320 ms |
| Deployment Model | N/A | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2024-03-04 | 2024-12-11 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Claude 3 Sonnet
$3.00
Mixtral 8x22B
$0.50
Output Price per Million Tokens
Claude 3 Sonnet
$15.00
Mixtral 8x22B
$1.00
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Benchmark Performance Metrics
Scores show the raw performance percentages verified across key evaluation suites. Higher bars indicate superior accuracy and capability in that domain.
Claude 3 Sonnet Quirks & Gotchas
No developer gotchas reported.
Mixtral 8x22B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸MoE architecture — efficient inference for its capability tier
- ▸Requires ~90GB VRAM at FP16 — 4-bit quantization recommended for single-GPU deployment