Table of Contents
Quick Verdict
Serving 18.0 requests per second versus 12.6 is not a marginal difference — it is 43% more capacity per GPU. For a production API on a dedicated GPU server that needs to absorb traffic spikes without spinning up extra instances, LLaMA 3 70B’s throughput advantage is decisive.
Qwen 72B cannot match that volume, but it brings something LLaMA 3 70B lacks entirely: a 128K context window. If your API accepts long-form inputs — full documents, extended chat histories, or multi-page prompts — Qwen handles them natively where LLaMA 3 would require truncation or chunking logic.
Detailed benchmarks follow. For more comparisons, see our GPU comparisons hub.
Specs Comparison
Nearly identical parameter counts mask a major architectural difference in context handling. Your API’s input payload size determines which model fits better.
| Specification | LLaMA 3 70B | Qwen 72B |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 70B | 72B |
| Architecture | Dense Transformer | Dense Transformer |
| Context Length | 8K | 128K |
| VRAM (FP16) | 140 GB | 145 GB |
| VRAM (INT4) | 40 GB | 42 GB |
| Licence | Meta Community | Qwen |
Deployment sizing: LLaMA 3 70B VRAM requirements and Qwen 72B VRAM requirements.
API Throughput Benchmark
Tested on an NVIDIA RTX 3090 with vLLM, INT4 quantisation, and continuous batching under sustained concurrent load. Refer to our tokens-per-second benchmark for additional data.
| Model (INT4) | Requests/sec | p50 Latency (ms) | p99 Latency (ms) | VRAM Used |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLaMA 3 70B | 18.0 | 64 | 289 | 40 GB |
| Qwen 72B | 12.6 | 97 | 349 | 42 GB |
LLaMA 3 70B wins every latency metric: 34% lower p50 and 17% lower p99. Under heavy load, this translates into better user experience and more headroom before you hit degraded performance. See our best GPU for LLM inference guide for hardware selection.
See also: LLaMA 3 70B vs Qwen 72B for Chatbot / Conversational AI for a related comparison.
See also: LLaMA 3 70B vs Mixtral 8x7B for API Serving (Throughput) for a related comparison.
Cost Analysis
More requests per second on the same GPU means fewer servers in your API fleet. At 43% higher throughput, LLaMA 3 70B lets you serve the same traffic volume with roughly 30% fewer GPU instances.
| Cost Factor | LLaMA 3 70B | Qwen 72B |
|---|---|---|
| GPU Required (INT4) | RTX 3090 (24 GB) | RTX 3090 (24 GB) |
| VRAM Used | 40 GB | 42 GB |
| Est. Monthly Server Cost | £154 | £144 |
| Throughput Advantage | 13% faster | 0% cheaper/tok |
Model your fleet size with the cost-per-million-tokens calculator.
Recommendation
Choose LLaMA 3 70B if your API serves high volumes of short-to-medium requests and throughput per GPU is your primary scaling constraint. Its 43% higher request rate means fewer instances, lower infrastructure cost, and simpler operations.
Choose Qwen 72B if your API must accept long-form inputs that exceed 8K tokens. There is no workaround for LLaMA 3 70B’s context limit that does not introduce complexity and quality degradation. When your payloads are large, Qwen is the only viable option.
Serve behind vLLM on dedicated GPU servers for production-grade reliability.
Deploy the Winner
Run LLaMA 3 70B or Qwen 72B on bare-metal GPU servers with full root access, no shared resources, and no token limits.
Browse GPU Servers
