# Llama 3-8B vs StarCoder 2 15B

> Llama 3-8B has enough public results to be ranked (#344); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

- Canonical page: https://noometry.com/compare/llama-3-8b-vs-starcoder-2-15b
- Last updated: 2026-10-10
- Shared benchmarks: 6

## Summary

- They share 6 benchmarks with published results for both. Llama 3-8B 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 31.0.

## Snapshot

| | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Provider | Meta | NVIDIA |
| Noometry Index | 25.5 | 38.1 |
| Rank | 344 | — |
| Context | — | — |
| Input $/M | — | — |
| Output $/M | — | — |
| Weights | Open | Open |

## Coding

- Llama 3-8B: 31.0 (#289)
- StarCoder 2 15B: 36.6

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| BigCodeBench Complete | 36.9% | 38.4% |
| HumanEval+ | 56.7% | 37.8% |
| BigCodeBench Instruct | 31.9% | — |
| LMArena Coding | 1152 | — |
| MBPP+ | 54.8% | — |

## Reasoning

- Llama 3-8B: 14.3 (#326)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities Index | 116.45 | 105 |
| WinoGrande | 75.7% | 64.3% |
| Chess Puzzles | 0% | — |
| LMArena Hard Prompts | 1133 | — |
| DTBench | 43.9% | — |
| Adversarial NLI | 57.3% | — |
| ForecastBench | 58.6 | — |

## Math

- Llama 3-8B: 8.8 (#323)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| OTIS Mock AIME 2024-2025 | 1.9% | — |
| LMArena Math | 1151 | — |
| MATH Level 5 | 6.1% | — |
| GSM8K | — | 57.7% |

## Knowledge

- Llama 3-8B: 7.8 (#308)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| ARC (AI2) Challenge | 82.8% | 47.2% |
| MMLU | 68.8% | 64.1% |
| GPQA Diamond | 26.1% | — |
| LMArena Expert | 1113 | — |
| OpenBookQA | 82.6% | — |
| TriviaQA | 67.7% | — |

## Multilingual

- Llama 3-8B: 30.8 (#261)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Non-English | 1098 | — |
| LMArena Chinese | 1076 | — |
| LMArena French | 1159 | — |
| LMArena German | 1104 | — |
| LMArena Japanese | 967 | — |
| LMArena Korean | 1004 | — |
| LMArena Russian | 1109 | — |
| LMArena Spanish | 1173 | — |

## Instruction Following

- Llama 3-8B: 58.4 (#260)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Instruction Following | 1127 | — |

## Long Context

- Llama 3-8B: 34.2 (#251)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Longer Query | 1128 | — |

## Writing & Preference

- Llama 3-8B: 37.5 (#256)
- StarCoder 2 15B: —

| Benchmark | Llama 3-8B | StarCoder 2 15B |
|---|---|---|
| LMArena Text | 1166 | — |
| LMArena Creative Writing | 1150 | — |
| LMArena Multi-Turn | 1152 | — |

## FAQ

### Is Llama 3-8B better than StarCoder 2 15B?

Llama 3-8B has enough public results to be ranked (#344); StarCoder 2 15B does not yet, so treat this comparison as directional.

### Is Llama 3-8B or StarCoder 2 15B better for coding?

StarCoder 2 15B scores higher on coding benchmarks: 36.6 versus 31.0 in the Noometry coding category.

### How many benchmarks do Llama 3-8B and StarCoder 2 15B share?

6 benchmarks have published results for both models. Llama 3-8B has 34 scored results on Noometry and StarCoder 2 15B has 7.