Mistral Small 3 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 Mistral Small 3 and Mixtral 8x22B.
Mistral Small 3
Mistral Small 3 is a 24B-parameter language model optimized for low-latency performance across common AI tasks. Released under the Apache 2.0 license, it features both pre-trained and instruction-tuned versions designed...
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 | Mistral Small 3 | Mixtral 8x22B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Mistral | Mistral |
| Context Window | 32,768 tokens | 65,536 tokens |
| Agent Suitability | 84/100 | 87/100 |
| Time to First Token (TTFT) | 120 ms | 320 ms |
| Deployment Model | managed api | self hostable |
| Production Stability | stable | stable |
| API Available | Yes | Yes |
| Released Date | 2025-01-30 | 2024-12-11 |
API Pricing Comparison
Input Price per Million Tokens
Mistral Small 3
$0.07
Mixtral 8x22B
$0.50
Output Price per Million Tokens
Mistral Small 3
$0.20
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.
Mistral Small 3 Quirks & Gotchas
- ▸Fastest TTFT at lowest cost — ideal for high-volume classification
- ▸Not designed for complex reasoning — route multi-step tasks to Mistral Large 3
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