Verdict
Built from the measurements below
- Accuracy is too close to call: Ministral 3 8B 2512 scored 42.5% and Solar Pro 4 45.0% on the same 80 questions, a gap within what chance alone could produce.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 is 6.8× cheaper per question as billed ($0.00027 vs $0.0018), reasoning tokens included.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 generates text 1.4× faster: 124 tokens per second against 91.
- Ministral 3 8B 2512 starts answering sooner: 0.3 s to the first token, against 0.6 s for Solar Pro 4.
- Solar Pro 4 accepts more context: 524k tokens against 262k.
Which should you choose?
Choose Ministral 3 8B 2512 for the lower cost per correct answer ($0.00063 against $0.0041), faster streaming, a quicker first token, shorter outputs (about 1,496 tokens per question against 2,952) and open weights you can run yourself. Choose Solar Pro 4 for a 524k-token context window. The widest subject gap is in science: Solar Pro 4 answered 18 of 30 correctly, Ministral 3 8B 2512 10 of 30. With so few questions per subject, treat this as a lead to test on your own prompts, not a result.
Accuracy gap -2.5 points (z = -0.32). We call a winner only when z is at least 1.96, the usual 95% threshold. Speed, latency and price need a 10% margin.