Compare / DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B vs MiniCPM-SALA

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B vs MiniCPM-SALA

Updated November 2026

Verdict

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B and MiniCPM-SALA are roughly tied on the Small LM Index (53.1 vs 52.6). On the 2 benchmarks both labs report, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B wins 1 and MiniCPM-SALA wins 1. Both need about 6.8 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself.

Pick DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B if…

you mostly write code
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Pick MiniCPM-SALA if…

you need math and reasoning
you work with long documents

Specifications

	DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B	MiniCPM-SALA
Small LM Index	53.1 (likely 48–58)	52.6 (likely 48–57)
Lab	DeepSeek · China	OpenBMB (MiniCPM) · China
Released	2025-05-29	2026-02-11
Parameters	8.2B (dense)	9.5B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~6.8 GB	~6.7 GB
Context window	128K tokens	1M tokens
Input	text	text
Reasoning	Always thinks	Hybrid (thinking on/off)
License	MIT	Apache-2.0
API price / 1M tokens	Self-host only	Self-host only
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	357.7K	3.7K

Benchmarks

Higher is better. Bold marks the winner where both labs report a score. ≈ marks the index model's estimate for a score that wasn't reported, ✓ an independent measurement and * a score measured by another lab.

Benchmark	DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B	MiniCPM-SALA
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	≈ 74	67.0
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	61.1	≈ 66
AIME Math	76.3	78.3
LiveCodeBench Coding	60.5	52.0
IFEval Instruction following	—	76.3

Scores are mostly reported by each lab with its own settings, so small gaps are noise. See the methodology. Open in the interactive comparison to add more models.

Questions

Which is better, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B or MiniCPM-SALA?

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B and MiniCPM-SALA are roughly tied on the Small LM Index (53.1 vs 52.6). On the 2 benchmarks both labs report, DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B wins 1 and MiniCPM-SALA wins 1.

Which is cheaper to run?

Neither model has a hosted API on OpenRouter, so you would run both yourself. Both need about 6.8 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

MiniCPM-SALA has the longer context window: 1M tokens against 128K.

Can I use DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B and MiniCPM-SALA commercially?

DeepSeek-R1-0528-Qwen3-8B is released under MIT and MiniCPM-SALA under Apache-2.0. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.