Funny thing is I’m still in love with Mistral 7B as it absolutely shreds on a nice GPU. For simple tasks it’s totally sufficient.
The difference matters as generally in my experience, Llama 3, by virtue of its giant vocabulary, generally tokenizes text with 20-25% less tokens than something like Mistral. So even if its 18% slower in terms of tokens/second, it may, depending on the text content, actually output a given body of text faster.