Compare / Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Llama 3.3 70B

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B vs Llama 3.3 70B

Updated November 2026

Verdict

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 73.3 vs 40.8. On the 1 benchmark both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B wins 1 and Llama 3.3 70B wins 0. Both need about 47.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization. Only Llama 3.3 70B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.15 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted.

Pick Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B if…

you want the strongest model overall
you work with long documents
you need image input

Pick Llama 3.3 70B if…

you want a hosted API rather than running it yourself
you want the more widely used model (more quantized builds and community support)

Specifications

	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Llama 3.3 70B
Small LM Index	73.3 (likely 72–75)	40.8 (likely 31–51)
Lab	NVIDIA · United States	Meta · United States
Released	2026-10-12	2024-12-06
Parameters	74B (9B active, MoE)	70.6B (dense)
Memory at 4-bit	~46.9 GB	~47.4 GB
Context window	262K tokens	128K tokens
Input	text, image	text
Reasoning	Hybrid (thinking on/off)	No thinking
License	OpenMDW-1.1	Llama 3.3 Community
API price / 1M tokens	Self-host only	$0.15 ($0.10 in, $0.32 out)
Hugging Face downloads (30 days)	7.7K	363.3K

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	Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B	Llama 3.3 70B
MMLU-Pro Knowledge	≈ 86	68.9
GPQA Diamond Knowledge	88.8	50.5
Humanity's Last Exam Reasoning	28.7	≈ 4
Terminal-Bench Agentic	53.9	—
AA-LCR Long context	67.4	—

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, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B or Llama 3.3 70B?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B scores higher on the Small LM Index: 73.3 vs 40.8. On the 1 benchmark both labs report, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B wins 1 and Llama 3.3 70B wins 0.

Which is cheaper to run?

Only Llama 3.3 70B has a hosted API on OpenRouter ($0.15 per million tokens); the other has to be self-hosted. Both need about 47.4 GB of memory at 4-bit quantization.

Which has the longer context window?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B has the longer context window: 262K tokens against 128K.

Can I use Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B and Llama 3.3 70B commercially?

Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B is released under OpenMDW-1.1 and Llama 3.3 70B under Llama 3.3 Community. Apache 2.0 and MIT allow commercial use; other licenses can add conditions, so read the license before shipping a product.