Claude Opus 4 6 ThinkingvsPhi 3 Small 8k Instruct
Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking leads the overall Podium Score by 16.0 points (75.0 vs 59.0).Category wins: Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking 0 — 0 Phi 3 Small 8k Instruct.Phi 3 Small 8k Instruct is the cheaper pick ($3/M vs $15/M per 1M output tokens). Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking is faster (50 t/s vs 50 t/s).
Key VerdictAggregated 2026 Benchmark Analysis
Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking is rated higher overall with a Podium Score of 75.0 (vs 59.0 for Phi 3 Small 8k Instruct). Both models show closely matched capabilities across domain benchmarks.
Coding & Engineering
Comparable
Inference Speed
Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking (50 t/s)
Cost Efficiency
Phi 3 Small 8k Instruct ($3/M/M)
| Metric | Claude Opus 4 6 Thinking | Phi 3 Small 8k Instruct |
|---|---|---|
| Podium Score | 75.0 ▲ | 59.0 |
| Arena Elo | — | — |
| Intelligence Index | — | — |
| Coding | — | — |
| Math | — | — |
| Reasoning | — | — |
| Agentic | — | — |
| Knowledge | — | — |
| Multimodal | — | — |
| Long-context | — | — |
| Output speed | 50 t/s | 50 t/s |
| Output price | $15/M | $3/M ▲ |
| Context window | 128K | 128K |
Scores aggregated from five independent leaderboards. See Methodology. More head-to-heads: Claude Opus 4 6 T vs Claude Mythos · Claude Opus 4 6 T vs Claude Fable 5 · Claude Opus 4 6 T vs Kimi K3 · Claude Opus 4 6 T vs Claude Opus 5