Plot twist: Mistral 7B actually beats LLaMA 3 8B on API throughput. With 28.1 requests per second against LLaMA’s 21.9, Mistral handles 28% more traffic on the same hardware. That sliding window attention architecture that sometimes hurts quality turns into a pure advantage when your priority is serving as many API calls as possible from a single dedicated GPU.
Load Test Results
Sustained load test on an RTX 3090, vLLM, INT4, continuous batching, 1-50 concurrent connections. Live data here.
| Model (INT4) | Requests/sec | p50 Latency (ms) | p99 Latency (ms) | VRAM Used |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| LLaMA 3 8B | 21.9 | 116 | 292 | 6.5 GB |
| Mistral 7B | 28.1 | 52 | 297 | 5.5 GB |
Mistral’s median latency of 52 ms is less than half LLaMA’s 116 ms. At the tail (p99), they converge — 292 ms versus 297 ms. This pattern is characteristic of SWA: extremely fast for short-context requests, but the advantage shrinks as requests require more context processing. For an API that mostly handles short prompts and brief responses, Mistral is the efficiency king.
Model Specifications
| Specification | LLaMA 3 8B | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| Parameters | 8B | 7B |
| Architecture | Dense Transformer | Dense Transformer + SWA |
| Context Length | 8K | 32K |
| VRAM (FP16) | 16 GB | 14.5 GB |
| VRAM (INT4) | 6.5 GB | 5.5 GB |
| Licence | Meta Community | Apache 2.0 |
Mistral’s 1 GB VRAM saving leaves more room for the KV cache, which directly translates to higher concurrent request capacity. Fewer parameters plus sliding window attention means less compute per token. Details in the LLaMA VRAM guide and Mistral VRAM guide.
Cost at Scale
| Cost Factor | LLaMA 3 8B | Mistral 7B |
|---|---|---|
| GPU Required (INT4) | RTX 3090 (24 GB) | RTX 3090 (24 GB) |
| VRAM Used | 6.5 GB | 5.5 GB |
| Est. Monthly Server Cost | £89 | £125 |
| Throughput Advantage | 12% faster | 4% cheaper/tok |
When you factor in throughput, Mistral’s cost-per-request is substantially lower since it handles 28% more requests on the same hardware. The cost calculator will show the exact savings at your traffic level.
Who Should Pick What
Mistral 7B for high-throughput API endpoints. If your API serves short requests — classification, extraction, sentiment, routing — and peak throughput is the constraint, Mistral delivers more requests per pound. The Apache 2.0 licence also simplifies commercial API offerings. Hardware guidance at best GPU for inference.
LLaMA 3 8B for quality-sensitive APIs. If your API generates longer responses where accuracy matters — summarisation endpoints, question-answering services, content generation — LLaMA’s higher quality output justifies the lower throughput. More comparisons at the comparisons hub.
Both run behind vLLM on dedicated hardware without shared-tenant latency spikes.
See also: LLaMA 3 vs Mistral for Chatbots | LLaMA 3 vs DeepSeek for API Serving
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