Head-to-head comparison across 3benchmark categories. Overall scores shown here use BenchLM's provisional ranking lane.
Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct
27
Nemotron 3 Ultra
63
Verified leaderboard positions: Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct unranked · Nemotron 3 Ultra #24
Pick Nemotron 3 Ultra if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Coding
+37.0 difference
Knowledge
+21.7 difference
Inst. Following
+5.9 difference
Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct
Nemotron 3 Ultra
N/A
$0 / $0
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
128K
1M
Pick Nemotron 3 Ultra if you want the stronger benchmark profile. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct only becomes the better choice if you would rather avoid the extra latency and token burn of a reasoning model.
Nemotron 3 Ultra is clearly ahead on the provisional aggregate, 63 to 27. The gap is large enough that you do not need to squint at the spreadsheet to see the difference.
Nemotron 3 Ultra's sharpest advantage is in coding, where it averages 74.2 against 37.2. The single biggest benchmark swing on the page is LiveCodeBench, 37.2% to 89%.
Nemotron 3 Ultra is the reasoning model in the pair, while Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct is not. That usually helps on harder chain-of-thought-heavy tests, but it can also mean more latency and more token spend in real use. Nemotron 3 Ultra gives you the larger context window at 1M, compared with 128K for Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct.
Nemotron 3 Ultra is ahead on BenchLM's provisional leaderboard, 63 to 27. The biggest single separator in this matchup is LiveCodeBench, where the scores are 37.2% and 89%.
Nemotron 3 Ultra has the edge for knowledge tasks in this comparison, averaging 62.6 versus 40.9. Inside this category, GPQA is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nemotron 3 Ultra has the edge for coding in this comparison, averaging 74.2 versus 37.2. Inside this category, LiveCodeBench is the benchmark that creates the most daylight between them.
Nemotron 3 Ultra has the edge for instruction following in this comparison, averaging 81.7 versus 75.8. Mellum2-12B-A2.5B-Instruct stays close enough that the answer can still flip depending on your workload.
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