# Granite 4.2 8B vs Mistral Large

> Granite 4.2 8B is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.5 to 31.9 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/granite-4-2-8b-vs-mistral-large
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 11

## Summary

- They share 11 benchmarks with published results for both. Granite 4.2 8B scores higher in 7 categories and Mistral Large in 0 categories; 6 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in reasoning, where Granite 4.2 8B leads 26.6 to 15.8.
- Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper at $0.06 / $0.25 per million input/output tokens, against $2 / $6 for Mistral Large.

## Snapshot

| | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | IBM | Mistral AI |
| Noometry Index | 40.5 | 31.9 |
| Rank | 148 | 263 |
| Context | 131K | 131K |
| Input $/M | $0.06 | $2 |
| Output $/M | $0.25 | $6 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.5 (#137)
- Mistral Large: 34.3 (#240)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1380 | 1277 |
| SciCode | — | 36.2% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 30% |
| LiveBench Coding | — | 47.1% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 38.3% |
| ALE-Bench | — | 264.7 |
| HumanEval+ | — | 62.2% |
| MBPP+ | — | 59.5% |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- Mistral Large: 28.6 (#89)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | — | 38.4% |

## Reasoning

- Granite 4.2 8B: 26.6 (#131)
- Mistral Large: 15.8 (#310)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1329 | 1257 |
| SimpleBench | — | 22.5% |
| CritPt | — | 0% |
| LiveBench Reasoning | — | 43.5% |
| DTBench | — | 65.1% |
| LiveBench Data Analysis | — | 50.1% |
| LMCA | — | 16.7% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | — | 128.52 |
| ForecastBench | — | 57.1 |
| LiveBench | — | 48.4% |

## Math

- Granite 4.2 8B: —
- Mistral Large: 18.2 (#291)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | — | 8.5% |
| Omni-MATH | — | 28.1% |
| LiveBench Math | — | 42.5% |
| LMArena Math | — | 1262 |
| MATH Level 5 | — | 50.3% |
| FrontierMath (Feb 2025 set) | — | 0.3% |

## Knowledge

- Granite 4.2 8B: 38.4 (#145)
- Mistral Large: 30.1 (#230)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Expert | 1384 | 1232 |
| GPQA Diamond | — | 51.3% |
| MMLU-Pro | — | 59.9% |
| Confabulations | — | 21.4% |
| Vectara Hallucination Rate | — | 4.5% |
| GPQA (HELM) | — | 43.5% |
| MMLU | — | 80% |

## Multilingual

- Granite 4.2 8B: 44.5 (#178)
- Mistral Large: 40.0 (#219)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1302 | 1237 |
| LMArena Chinese | 1366 | 1240 |
| LMArena Russian | 1285 | 1257 |
| LMArena French | — | 1325 |
| LMArena German | — | 1254 |
| LMArena Japanese | — | 1188 |
| LMArena Korean | — | 1202 |
| LMArena Spanish | — | 1268 |

## Instruction Following

- Granite 4.2 8B: 68.7 (#184)
- Mistral Large: 67.9 (#191)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1301 | 1249 |
| LiveBench Instruction Following | — | 67.9% |
| IFEval | — | 87.7% |

## Long Context

- Granite 4.2 8B: 40.3 (#159)
- Mistral Large: 38.3 (#199)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1324 | 1261 |

## Writing & Preference

- Granite 4.2 8B: 49.6 (#189)
- Mistral Large: 40.7 (#242)

| Benchmark | Granite 4.2 8B | Mistral Large |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1320 | 1266 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1236 | 1243 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1301 | 1260 |
| Short-Story Creative Writing | — | 69% |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | — | 985 |
| WildBench | — | 80.1% |
| LiveBench Language | — | 39.4% |

## FAQ

### Is Granite 4.2 8B better than Mistral Large?

Granite 4.2 8B is the stronger model overall, scoring 40.5 to 31.9 on the Noometry Index.

### Which is cheaper, Granite 4.2 8B or Mistral Large?

Granite 4.2 8B is cheaper. It lists at $0.06 per million input tokens and $0.25 per million output tokens; Mistral Large lists at $2 and $6.

### Is Granite 4.2 8B or Mistral Large better for coding?

Granite 4.2 8B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 40.5 versus 34.3 in the Noometry coding category.

### Which has the bigger context window?

Both accept 131K tokens.

### How many benchmarks do Granite 4.2 8B and Mistral Large share?

11 benchmarks have published results for both models. Granite 4.2 8B has 11 scored results on Noometry and Mistral Large has 51.