Mistral Small 3.2 vs Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)

Which is better for the money: Mistral Small 3.2 by Mistral or Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) by NVIDIA? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-10-27.

Trade-off

MistralMistral Small 3.2Off the frontier

Intelligence: 7.00
Total cost: $122

NVIDIANemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 12.80
Total cost: $1319

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) scores 5.8 points higher (12.8 vs 7.0) but costs 11× as much to run the benchmark ($1319 vs $122; premium vs mid-range cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) when you need intelligence above 7.0, and Mistral Small 3.2 when 7.0 is enough.

Metric	Mistral Small 3.2	Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	7.0	12.8	+82.9% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 82.9% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$121.78	$1,318.62	+982.8% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 11× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	10.54s	16.78s	+59.2% Nemotron 3 Super 120B… is 59.2% slower
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.07 / $0.20	$0.30 / $0.90
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text

Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) vs Mistral Small 3.2: 82.9% more intelligence, 982.8% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 59.2% slower end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker Mistral Small 3.2: what beats it Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning): what beats it

Today's Pareto frontier

Against the frontier

Mistral Small 3.2 is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, MiMo-V2.6-Flash scores 37.90 for $110.
Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning) is off the frontier: at the same or lower cost, GPT-6.1 Sol (Max) scores 51.80 for $1082.

Mistral Small 3.2Nemotron 3 Super 120B A12B (Reasoning)Today'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/mistral-small-3-2/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/mistral-small-3-2/nvidia-nemotron-3-super-120b-a12b?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill