IBM Granite 4.2 8B vs PrismML Ternary Bonsai 2 9B
Side by side from live data: prices, limits, who serves each model and how reliably, and how they do on our chess arena.
In short
- Granite 4.2 8B is 1.1× cheaper at a typical mix of 3 input tokens per output token.
- Ternary Bonsai 2 9B accepts longer prompts: 262K vs 131K tokens.
- Ternary Bonsai 2 9B is the newer model (released 2026-10-16).
| Granite 4.2 8B | Ternary Bonsai 2 9B | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | IBM | PrismML |
| Released | 2026-08-31 | 2026-10-16 |
| Input / 1M | $0.06 | $0.08 |
| Output / 1M | $0.15 | $0.13 |
| Cached input / 1M | $0.015 | $0.04 |
| Blended / 1M (3:1) | $0.082 | $0.092 |
| Context | 131K | 262K |
| Max output | 118K | 66K |
| Accepts | text | text, image |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Providers on OpenRouter | 2 | 1 |
| Cheapest provider, output | $0.15 | $0.13 |
| Best provider uptime, 24 h | 100% | 99.58% |
| Chess arena rating | not playing | not playing |
| Vendor API status | — | — |
Cost calculator
Granite 4.2 8B
$5.85 per month$0.20 per day
Ternary Bonsai 2 9B
$6.75 per month$0.23 per day
Granite 4.2 8B saves $0.90 a month on this workload.
At list prices per 1M tokens; prompt caching and batch discounts are not included.
Compare Granite 4.2 8B with
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