Llama 3.1 405B 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 Llama 3.1 405B and Mixtral 8x22B.
Llama 3.1 405B
Llama 3.1 405B is Meta's largest open-weight language model and one of the most capable openly available models in the world. With 405 billion parameters, it achieves performance competitive with GPT-4 and Claude Opus across benchmarks spanning general knowledge, mathematics, coding, and multilingual tasks. Llama 3.1 405B is released under Meta's custom commercial license, supporting broad use cases including deployment via major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and self-hosted inference with multi-GPU configurations.
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 | Llama 3.1 405B | Mixtral 8x22B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Mistral |
| Context Window | 131,072 tokens | 65,536 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 90/100 | 87/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 550 ms | 320 ms |
| Deployment Model | self hostable | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2024-07-23 | 2024-12-11 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
Mixtral 8x22B
$0.50
Output Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 405B
$0.80
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.
Llama 3.1 405B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Massive model — requires 8× A100 80GB for FP16 inference
- ▸Available via Together AI, Fireworks, and Bedrock as managed API
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