Llama 3.1 405B vs Nova Premier
Meta vs Amazon · Prices checked 12 August 2026
Llama 3.1 405B is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin: $0.800 per million tokens blended against $5.50, roughly 6.9× less. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.088 on Llama 3.1 405B against $0.375 on Nova Premier.
Nova Premier leads on 3 of the 5 benchmarks both models report. The widest gap is on MATH, where Nova Premier leads by 11 points. 1 suite tied. Nova Premier takes a 300,000-token context window against 128,000, giving 2.3× more room for long documents or whole-codebase work.
Pricing and capacity
| Metric | Llama 3.1 405B | Nova Premier | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Input / 1M tokens | $0.800 | $2.50 | 3.1× |
| Output / 1M tokens | $0.800 | $12.50 | 15.6× |
| Blended · 70/30calculated | $0.800 | $5.50 | 6.9× |
| Blended · 50/50calculated | $0.800 | $7.50 | 9.4× |
| Blended · 80/20calculated | $0.800 | $4.50 | 5.6× |
| Blended · 20/80calculated | $0.800 | $10.50 | 13.1× |
| Job cost · 100K + 10Kcalculated | $0.088 | $0.375 | 4.3× |
| Job cost · 1M + 100Kcalculated | $0.880 | $3.75 | 4.3× |
| Context window | 128,000 | 300,000 | 2.3× |
Input and output rates are as published by each provider. Blended and job-cost rows are calculated comparison metrics, not published prices — how they are derived.
Benchmarks
| Benchmark | Llama 3.1 405B | Nova Premier | Leader |
|---|---|---|---|
| MMLU | 88% | 88% | Level |
| GPQA Diamond | 51% | 60% | Nova Premier |
| MATH | 73% | 84% | Nova Premier |
| HumanEval | 89% | 92% | Nova Premier |
| LMArena Elo | 1290 Elo | 1280 Elo | Llama 3.1 405B |
Only suites both models report are listed, so a missing score is never shown as a loss. Figures are provider-published or from public leaderboards and are not independently re-run.
What each model is for
Llama 3.1 405B
Meta · Large
Largest dense Llama. Used as a quality benchmark for open weights, heavy to run, often hosted via Together / DeepInfra / Cerebras.
- Top open-weights quality
- Permissive license
- Strong reasoning
Nova Premier
Amazon · Top-tier
AWS's frontier-tier Nova. Premier multimodal model targeting complex agentic workloads inside Bedrock.
- Frontier-tier Nova
- Strong reasoning + vision
- Tight Bedrock + IAM integration
- Long context
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Llama 3.1 405B or Nova Premier?
Llama 3.1 405B is the cheaper of the two by a wide margin: $0.800 per million tokens blended against $5.50, roughly 6.9× less. A single 100K-input, 10K-output job costs $0.088 on Llama 3.1 405B against $0.375 on Nova Premier. Blended cost weights input at 70% and output at 30%; price your own token split for an exact answer, since the cheaper model on a blended basis is not always cheaper for your workload.
Which performs better, Llama 3.1 405B or Nova Premier?
Nova Premier leads on 3 of the 5 benchmarks both models report. The widest gap is on MATH, where Nova Premier leads by 11 points. 1 suite tied. These are the figures each provider or public leaderboard publishes, not results we re-run, and a benchmark average can hide the specific behaviour your workload depends on.
Which has the larger context window, Llama 3.1 405B or Nova Premier?
Nova Premier takes a 300,000-token context window against 128,000, giving 2.3× more room for long documents or whole-codebase work. The context window caps everything in a single request: prompt, retrieved documents, conversation history and the model’s own output all share it.
Can I compare Llama 3.1 405B and Nova Premier on my own numbers?
Yes. Open both in the side-by-side comparison tool to see every field at once, or use the token calculator to price your actual prompt and monthly request volume against each model. Both are free and need no sign-up.
Price it for your own workload
Related matchups
Terms used on this page
Prices and scores are recomputed on every deploy from the catalogue. Prices checked 12 August 2026.