# Llama 2-70B vs Llama 3-8B

> Llama 3-8B is the stronger model overall, scoring 25.3 to 24.1 on the Noometry Index.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/llama-2-70b-vs-llama-3-8b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 28

## Summary

- They share 28 benchmarks with published results for both. Llama 2-70B scores higher in 1 category and Llama 3-8B in 7 categories; 4 gaps are clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in writing & preference, where Llama 3-8B leads 37.7 to 32.5.

## Snapshot

| | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | Meta |
| Noometry Index | 24.1 | 25.3 |
| Rank | 343 | 338 |
| Context | — | 8K |
| Input $/M | — | $0.14 |
| Output $/M | — | $0.14 |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Llama 2-70B: 30.8 (#281)
- Llama 3-8B: 30.5 (#285)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Coding | 1079 | 1152 |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | — | 31.9% |
| BigCodeBench Complete | — | 36.9% |
| HumanEval+ | — | 56.7% |
| MBPP+ | — | 54.8% |

## Reasoning

- Llama 2-70B: 13.7 (#324)
- Llama 3-8B: 13.8 (#321)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1073 | 1133 |
| DTBench | 41.6% | 43.9% |
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 113.59 | 116.33 |
| ForecastBench | 51.4 | 58.6 |
| WinoGrande | 80.2% | 75.7% |
| Chess Puzzles | — | 0% |
| Adversarial NLI | — | 57.3% |
| BIG-Bench Hard | 64.9% | — |
| CommonsenseQA 2.0 | 50% | — |
| HellaSwag | 85.3% | — |
| LAMBADA | 78.9% | — |
| PIQA | 82.8% | — |

## Math

- Llama 2-70B: 7.5 (#320)
- Llama 3-8B: 8.3 (#317)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 0% | 1.9% |
| LMArena Math | 1091 | 1151 |
| MATH Level 5 | 3.3% | 6.1% |
| GSM8K | 69.6% | — |

## Knowledge

- Llama 2-70B: 7.4 (#305)
- Llama 3-8B: 7.8 (#303)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| GPQA Diamond | 26.3% | 26.1% |
| LMArena Expert | 1039 | 1113 |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 78.3% | 82.8% |
| MMLU | 69.9% | 68.8% |
| OpenBookQA | 60.2% | 82.6% |
| TriviaQA | 87.6% | 67.7% |
| BoolQ | 88.6% | — |

## Multilingual

- Llama 2-70B: 27.9 (#269)
- Llama 3-8B: 31.0 (#256)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1045 | 1098 |
| LMArena Chinese | 994 | 1076 |
| LMArena French | 1089 | 1158 |
| LMArena German | 1041 | 1104 |
| LMArena Japanese | 927 | 967 |
| LMArena Korean | 964 | 1003 |
| LMArena Russian | 1083 | 1109 |
| LMArena Spanish | 1142 | 1172 |

## Instruction Following

- Llama 2-70B: 55.1 (#273)
- Llama 3-8B: 58.7 (#255)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1071 | 1127 |

## Long Context

- Llama 2-70B: 32.2 (#265)
- Llama 3-8B: 34.2 (#246)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1062 | 1128 |

## Writing & Preference

- Llama 2-70B: 32.5 (#274)
- Llama 3-8B: 37.7 (#251)

| Benchmark | Llama 2-70B | Llama 3-8B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1115 | 1166 |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1075 | 1150 |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1088 | 1152 |

## FAQ

### Is Llama 2-70B better than Llama 3-8B?

Llama 3-8B is the stronger model overall, scoring 25.3 to 24.1 on the Noometry Index.

### Is Llama 2-70B or Llama 3-8B better for coding?

They score almost the same on coding (30.8 vs 30.5); test both on your own repository before choosing.

### How many benchmarks do Llama 2-70B and Llama 3-8B share?

28 benchmarks have published results for both models. Llama 2-70B has 35 scored results on Noometry and Llama 3-8B has 34.
