IBM

Granite 4.2 8B InstructOpen

IBM Granite 4.2 8B lightweight enterprise foundation model with high throughput and low cost.

#402released Jul 20, 2026·Open Weights·8 billion
text128K ctx
API providersGet API Key →Leaderboard
Intelligence
49.2 #402
AAQI 43.0
Output Speed
115 t/s
TTFT 200 ms · ITL 8.7 ms/tok
Blended price (3:1)
$0.22 /1M
In $0.15/M · Out $0.45/M
Context
128K
≈ 320 A4 pages · max out 8,192

Quality Domain Radar

6-Axis Frontier Evaluation vs Category Average & Flagship

Granite 4.2 8B Instruct
Claude Mythos Preview (#1)
Average (68)
Coding (44)Mathematics (45.2)Hard Science (GPQA) (46)Agentic & Tool Use (42)Knowledge (MMLU) (45)Vision / Multimodal (25)

Radar axes are approximated from category scores where direct benchmark measurements are missing — see Methodology.

Strengths & Trade-offs

Where it wins

  • Open weights — self-host, fine-tune and audit with no vendor lock-in
  • Sub-400ms time-to-first-token
  • Very low blended price — $0.22/1M mixed tokens
  • Cheap prompt-cache reads at $0.02/1M

Killer Use Cases

Real-time agents
Low-latency loops for voice, gaming and interactive copilots.
High-volume batch jobs
Classification, extraction and summarization at minimal cost per call.
On-prem deployment
Air-gapped and regulated-environment serving on your own hardware.

Developer Quickstart & API

Set HF_TOKEN first — get an API key
curl https://router.huggingface.co/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $HF_TOKEN" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "model": "granite-4-2-8b",
    "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Refactor this function for O(n) time and explain the change."}]
  }'

Official Resources & Links

API deployment

Compare hosts & latency

Throughput, TTFT and cache pricing across Groq, Cerebras, Together, DeepInfra, Fireworks, Bedrock and Azure.

GroqCerebrasTogether AIDeepInfraFireworks AIAWS BedrockAzure AI
View providers matrix →

Scores by Source

Live Specs & Architecture

Under the hood
Dense · 8 billion
  • Prompt caching supported — cached input reads at $0.02/1M tokens.
Release date
Jul 20, 2026
Architecture
Dense · 8 billion
Parameters
8 billion
License
Open Weights
Context Window
128,000 tokens
Max Output
8,192 tokens
Modalities
text
Cache Pricing
read $0.02 · write $0.2 /1M
Reasoning
—
Input Price
$0.15/M
Output Price
$0.45/M
Output Speed
115 t/s
Time to First Token
200 ms
Data Updated
Aug 28, 2026

Estimated monthly bill

Estimated monthly spend
$0.00
Calculating savings vs GPT-4o...

Cite & embed

GitHub Markdown badge
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BibTeX
@misc{llmpodium2026granite428b,
  title = {Benchmark Analysis and Intelligence Evaluation of Granite 4.2 8B Instruct},
  author = {LLMPodium Research},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://llmpodium.com/models/granite-4-2-8b}
}

Embed Score Badge

Add a live Podium Score badge to your GitHub or Hugging Face README — it links back to the live ranking.

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Granite 4.2 8B Instruct LLMPodium Score
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