Granite 4.2 8B vs Mercury 2
Which is better for the money: Granite 4.2 8B by IBM or Mercury 2 by Inception? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-25.
Clear winner
Verdict
Pick Granite 4.2 8B
Mercury 2 vs Granite 4.2 8B: 2.7% less intelligence, 97.7% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 85.8% faster end-to-end.
| Metric | Granite 4.2 8B | Mercury 2 | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence (higher is better) | 11.1 | 10.8 | −2.7% Mercury 2 is 2.7% less intelligent |
| Total AA cost (lower is better) | $53.07 | $104.94 | +97.7% Mercury 2 is 97.7% more expensive |
| End-to-end time (lower is better) | 46.99s | 6.65s | −85.8% Mercury 2 is 85.8% faster |
| Price per 1M tokens (in / out) | $0.06 / $0.25 | $0.25 / $0.75 | |
| Input modalities | Text | Text |
Today's Pareto frontier
Against the frontier
- Granite 4.2 8B is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6 Luna (High) scores 32.90 for $47.9.
- Mercury 2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) scores 37.80 for $94.1.
Granite 4.2 8BMercury 2Today's Pareto frontierOpen-weights frontierEvery other model
Matchup
Compare something else
Agents:
Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/mercury-2 · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/granite-4-2-8b/mercury-2?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill