What are the hardware requirements for Granite 4.2 8B?

Granite 4.2 8B requires approximately 17.6 GB of VRAM and supports a context window of 128K tokens. Quantized variants may run on less VRAM; see the Quantized Models section on this page.

Who developed Granite 4.2 8B and how large is it?

Granite 4.2 8B is developed by ibm-granite, a model with 8b parameters. The model is published as open weights on Hugging Face and indexed on LLM Explorer with full benchmark history.

How does Granite 4.2 8B perform on standard benchmarks?

Granite 4.2 8B has the following published scores: LMSYS ELO 1288. Compare against reference models on this page or on the LLM Explorer leaderboards.

Granite 4.2 8B by ibm-granite — VRAM 17.6GB, 128K context

Name: Granite 4.2 8B
Author: ibm-granite

Granite 4.2 8B is an open-source language model by ibm-granite. Features: 8b LLM, VRAM: 17.6GB, Context: 128K, License: apache-2.0, LLM Explorer Score: 0.46, ELO: 1288.

Ar Base model:finetune:ibm-granit... Base model:ibm-granite/granite... Conversational Cs De En Endpoints compatible Es Fr Granite Granite-4.2 Ibm It Ja Ko Nl Pt Reasoning Region:us Safetensors Sharded Tensorflow Thinking Tool-calling Zh

Model Card on HF 🤗: https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b

Granite 4.2 8B Benchmarks

LMSys ELO 1288 vs 1272 (so35) 1.3%

^nn.n% — How the model compares to the reference models: Anthropic Sonnet 3.5 ("so35"), GPT-4o ("gpt4o") or GPT-4 ("gpt4").

What is the LLM Explorer Rank (Score)

Granite 4.2 8B Parameters and Internals

LLM Name	Granite 4.2 8B
Repository 🤗	https://huggingface.co/ibm-granite/granite-4.2-8b
Base Model(s)	ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-base ibm-granite/granite-4.1-8b-base
Model Size	8b
Required VRAM	17.6 GB
Updated	2026-08-26
Maintainer	ibm-granite
Model Type	granite
Model Files	5.3 GB: 1-of-4 5.3 GB: 2-of-4 5.4 GB: 3-of-4 1.6 GB: 4-of-4
Supported Languages	en de es fr ja pt ar cs it ko nl zh
Model Architecture	GraniteForCausalLM
License	apache-2.0
Context Length	131072
Model Max Length	131072
Transformers Version	4.57.1
Tokenizer Class	GPT2Tokenizer
Padding Token	<\|im_end\|>
Vocabulary Size	100352
Torch Data Type	bfloat16
Errors	replace

Rank the Granite 4.2 8B capabilities

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Instruction Following and Task Automation
Factuality and Completeness of Knowledge
Censorship and Alignment
Data Analysis and Insight Generation
Text Generation
Text Summarization and Feature Extraction
Code Generation
Multi-Language Support and Translation

Best Alternatives to Granite 4.2 8B

Best Alternatives	Context / RAM	Downloads	Likes
Granite 4.1 8B	128K / 17.6 GB	21803	161
Granite 3.1 8B Instruct	128K / 16.4 GB	138888	168
Granite 4.1 8B Base	128K / 16.8 GB	11348	25
Granite Guardian 4.1 8B	128K / 16.8 GB	35637	33
Granite 4.2 8B Heretic	128K / 17.6 GB	359	1
Granite 4.2 8B Symbolic Cot	128K / 17.6 GB	228	2
Granite 3.1 8B Reasoning	128K / 16.4 GB	5	1
Granite 3.1 8B Instruct	128K / 16.4 GB	185	1
Granite 4.2 8B Mxfp4	128K / 5.9 GB	393	1
Granite 3.2 8B Instruct	128K / 16.4 GB	3792	92