Compare
StarCoder2 15B vs Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
Same hardware, same arithmetic, side by side. Every memory figure is calculated from published model geometry rather than quoted from a marketing page.
Estimated
Side by side
On GeForce RTX 4090
| Property | StarCoder2 15B | Llama 3.1 8B Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | BigCode | Meta |
| Parameters | 16B | 8B |
| Architecture | StarCoder2 · dense | Llama · dense |
| Context | 16k | 128k |
| Layers | 40 | 32 |
| Hidden size | 6,144 | 4,096 |
| KV heads | 4 of 48 | 8 of 32 |
| Licence | BigCode OpenRAIL-M | Llama 3.1 Community License |
| Commercial use | Yes | Yes |
| Modalities | text | text |
| Released | 2024-02-28 | 2024-07-23 |
| Recommended quantization | Q8_0 | Q8_0 |
| Memory needed | 17 GB | 9.5 GB |
| Estimated tok/s | 46 | 92 |
| Fit | Good fit | Excellent fit |
| Fine-tune here | Yes | Yes |
| MMLU (reported) | — | 69.4% |
| HUMANEVAL (reported) | — | 72.6% |
Benchmark rows are figures the model's authors published, not ModelLM measurements, and the two models may not have been evaluated under identical conditions.
Trade-offs
StarCoder2 15B
A base completion model trained on permissively-licensed source with full provenance. Not a chat model.
Strengths
- Fully traceable training data
- Excellent fill-in-the-middle
- 600+ languages
Limitations
- Base model — needs instruction tuning for chat
- OpenRAIL-M carries use restrictions
Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
The most widely supported open model there is. If a tool, adapter or tutorial exists, it was written for this one first.
Strengths
- Unmatched ecosystem support
- 128k context
- Very stable fine-tuning behaviour
Limitations
- Benchmarks now behind newer 7–9B models
- Community licence with an acceptable-use policy
Common comparisons