# Llama 3.1-8B vs StarCoder 2 15B

> Llama 3.1-8B has enough public results to be ranked (#352); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/llama-3-1-8b-vs-starcoder-2-15b
- Last updated: 2026-10-11
- Shared benchmarks: 5

## Summary

- They share 5 benchmarks with published results for both. Llama 3.1-8B scores higher in 0 categories and StarCoder 2 15B in 1 category; one gap is clear of the uncertainty.
- The widest gap is in coding, where StarCoder 2 15B leads 36.6 to 20.2.

## Snapshot

| | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 23.0 | 38.1 |
| Rank | 352 | — |
| Context | 128K | — |
| Input $/M | $0.05 | — |
| Output $/M | $0.08 | — |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Llama 3.1-8B: 20.2 (#340)
- StarCoder 2 15B: 36.6

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Complete | 40.5% | 38.4% |
| HumanEval+ | 62.8% | 37.8% |
| SciCode | 13.2% | — |
| WeirdML | 1.7% | — |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 32.8% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1195 | — |
| MBPP+ | 55.6% | — |

## Agentic & Tool Use

- Llama 3.1-8B: 22.5 (#131)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard | 25.8% | — |
| BALROG | 15.1% | — |

## Reasoning

- Llama 3.1-8B: 14.9 (#321)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 116.57 | 105 |
| CritPt | 0% | — |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1175 | — |
| DTBench | 50.9% | — |
| LMCA | 5.4% | — |
| PIQA | 81.2% | — |
| WinoGrande | — | 64.3% |

## Math

- Llama 3.1-8B: 10.2 (#317)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| GSM8K | 82.4% | 57.7% |
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.7% | — |
| Omni-MATH | 13.7% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1179 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 22.9% | — |

## Knowledge

- Llama 3.1-8B: 8.0 (#307)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 56.1% | 64.1% |
| GPQA Diamond | 27% | — |
| MMLU-Pro | 40.6% | — |
| GPQA (HELM) | 24.7% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1144 | — |
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | — | 47.2% |
| BoolQ | 82.8% | — |

## Multilingual

- Llama 3.1-8B: 34.0 (#249)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1148 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1151 | — |
| LMArena French | 1177 | — |
| LMArena German | 1144 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 1061 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1053 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1158 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1169 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Llama 3.1-8B: 58.9 (#258)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| IFEval | 74.3% | — |
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1159 | — |

## Long Context

- Llama 3.1-8B: 35.8 (#238)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1182 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Llama 3.1-8B: 29.7 (#290)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3.1-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1187 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1154 | — |
| EQ-Bench Creative Writing | 713 | — |
| WildBench | 68.7% | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1172 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Llama 3.1-8B better than StarCoder 2 15B?

Llama 3.1-8B has enough public results to be ranked (#352); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Is Llama 3.1-8B or StarCoder 2 15B better for coding?

StarCoder 2 15B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.6 versus 20.2 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Llama 3.1-8B and StarCoder 2 15B share?

5 benchmarks have published results for both models. Llama 3.1-8B has 43 scored results on Noometry and StarCoder 2 15B has 7.