inference/research
verifiedhigh · 0.90updated 2026-10-03

Llama 3.1 8B

dense 8.03B

Fields

id
models/llama-3-1-8b
Family
llama
Vendor
Meta
Release year
2024
Architecture
dense
Params (B)
8.03
Active params (B)
8.03
Hidden size
4,096
Layers
32
KV heads
8
Head dim
128
GQA ratio
4
Max context
131,072
Context scaling
llama3 rope scaling (factor 8 from an 8192 base)
Context scaling method
llama3
Activation
silu
Attention variant
GQA
KV cache (bytes/token)
131,072
FLOPs per active token
16,060,000,000
Open weights
yes
License
Llama 3.1 Community License
notes
PARAMS: 8.03B is the safetensors count (8B nominal). KV: 32 * 8 * 128 * 2 * 2 bytes = 131,072 bytes/token = 128 KiB/token. This is the reference point for how much GQA bought: at 8k context it is 1.0 GiB per sequence; the same 8k on a 32-head MHA model would be 4x that. head_dim is not set explicitly in config.json; 4096/32 = 128 is the HF-implied value and is what the KV arithmetic uses. SOURCE CAVEAT: Meta's own Hugging Face repo is gated (HTTP 401 unauthenticated). These config values come from the NousResearch mirror of the same weights, which is not a first-party URL. SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=dense-gqa. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: ordinary causal attention plus GEMM/GEMV. This is the baseline every engine in this repo implements, so the join here is a floor rather than a filter: no engine record in data/engines/ states that dense GQA is unsupported. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM LlamaForCausalLM / Qwen2 / Qwen3 / Mistral / Phi3ForCausalLM rows [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]; TensorRT-LLM LlamaForCausalLM, Qwen2ForCausalLM, Qwen3ForCausalLM, Phi3ForCausalLM rows [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]; SGLang generative table (Llama, Qwen, Mistral families) [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]; llama.cpp LLM_ARCH_LLAMA [[pap-arch-llamacpp-arch-registry]]. HARD CONSTRAINTS THAT DO APPLY even to dense GQA, and they are model-shape rather than architecture-class: tensor-parallel size must divide the attention head count or the engine refuses to start [[mgpu-tp-size-must-divide-attention-heads]] (affects vllm and sglang); and a GQA KV cache is the thing paged-attention machinery exists for, so an engine with no paged KV (llama.cpp's slot-based pool [[llama-cpp]], exllamav2 [[exllamav2]]) loses the concurrency lever rather than the ability to run. ONE HARDWARE-DEPENDENT KERNEL GATE THAT IS NOT ABOUT GQA: on RDNA, vLLM's custom paged-attention kernel is gated on head_size == 128 AND block_size == 16, so a dense GQA model with head_dim 256 falls to the Triton 2D fallback and decode falls off a cliff - measured 12.1 tok/s at 518 tokens of context to 4.2 tok/s at 32k, with kernel_paged_attention_2d growing 28.3x [[rdna-triton-paged-attn-decode-cliff]]. Check head_dim before blaming the card. CONTEXT_SCALING_METHOD (llama3): config-derived; the existing free text 'llama3 rope scaling (factor 8 from an 8192 base)' agrees.

Notes

PARAMS: 8.03B is the safetensors count (8B nominal). KV: 32 * 8 * 128 * 2 * 2 bytes = 131,072 bytes/token = 128 KiB/token. This is the reference point for how much GQA bought: at 8k context it is 1.0 GiB per sequence; the same 8k on a 32-head MHA model would be 4x that. head_dim is not set explicitly in config.json; 4096/32 = 128 is the HF-implied value and is what the KV arithmetic uses. SOURCE CAVEAT: Meta's own Hugging Face repo is gated (HTTP 401 unauthenticated). These config values come from the NousResearch mirror of the same weights, which is not a first-party URL.

SERVICEABILITY JOIN (added 2026-10-03; the architecture x engine matrix this record was missing, with a citation per cell in docs/13-model-compatibility.md): FAMILY=dense-gqa. REQUIRED KERNEL CLASS: ordinary causal attention plus GEMM/GEMV. This is the baseline every engine in this repo implements, so the join here is a floor rather than a filter: no engine record in data/engines/ states that dense GQA is unsupported. SUPPORTED BY (cited): vLLM LlamaForCausalLM / Qwen2 / Qwen3 / Mistral / Phi3ForCausalLM rows [[mdl2-vllm-supported-models-2026-10]]; TensorRT-LLM LlamaForCausalLM, Qwen2ForCausalLM, Qwen3ForCausalLM, Phi3ForCausalLM rows [[mdl2-trtllm-supported-models]]; SGLang generative table (Llama, Qwen, Mistral families) [[mdl2-sglang-generative-models]]; llama.cpp LLM_ARCH_LLAMA [[pap-arch-llamacpp-arch-registry]]. HARD CONSTRAINTS THAT DO APPLY even to dense GQA, and they are model-shape rather than architecture-class: tensor-parallel size must divide the attention head count or the engine refuses to start [[mgpu-tp-size-must-divide-attention-heads]] (affects vllm and sglang); and a GQA KV cache is the thing paged-attention machinery exists for, so an engine with no paged KV (llama.cpp's slot-based pool [[llama-cpp]], exllamav2 [[exllamav2]]) loses the concurrency lever rather than the ability to run. ONE HARDWARE-DEPENDENT KERNEL GATE THAT IS NOT ABOUT GQA: on RDNA, vLLM's custom paged-attention kernel is gated on head_size == 128 AND block_size == 16, so a dense GQA model with head_dim 256 falls to the Triton 2D fallback and decode falls off a cliff - measured 12.1 tok/s at 518 tokens of context to 4.2 tok/s at 32k, with kernel_paged_attention_2d growing 28.3x [[rdna-triton-paged-attn-decode-cliff]]. Check head_dim before blaming the card.

CONTEXT_SCALING_METHOD (llama3): config-derived; the existing free text 'llama3 rope scaling (factor 8 from an 8192 base)' agrees.

Cross-references

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