Llama 3.1 8B 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 8B and Mixtral 8x22B.
Llama 3.1 8B
Llama 3.1 8B is Meta's lightweight open-weight model from the Llama 3.1 generation, optimized for efficient deployment on consumer hardware and edge devices. Despite its compact 8-billion-parameter size, it delivers strong performance on instruction following, text summarization, and lightweight coding tasks. Lllama 3.1 8B is the most downloaded model in the Llama family and runs efficiently on laptops, single GPUs, and CPU via quantization — making it the default choice for on-device AI applications and local prototyping.
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 8B | Mixtral 8x22B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Mistral |
| Context Window | 131,072 tokens | 65,536 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 74/100 | 87/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 80 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 8B
$0.04
Mixtral 8x22B
$0.50
Output Price per Million Tokens
Llama 3.1 8B
$0.04
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 8B Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Perfect for CPU/edge deployment — runs on Raspberry Pi with quantization
- ▸Limited tool calling vs larger models — best for simple classification and chat
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