Side-by-side comparison of IBM Granite 4.1 8B (IBM · USA) and MiniCPM5-1B (OpenBMB) for self-hosted deployment of the open-weight model. IBM Granite 4.1 8B is rated EU-ready; MiniCPM5-1B is conditional. They part ways on training data: IBM Granite 4.1 8B is "Disclosed", MiniCPM5-1B is "Documented".
| Field | ||
|---|---|---|
| Summary | ||
| Verdict | EU-ready Per the published model card, Granite 4.1 8B is an Apache 2.0 9B-parameter dense decoder with a 131k-token context, sourced from publicly-available datasets, internal synthetic data and human-curated material. IBM continues the unusual-for-the-industry training-data transparency that anchored the Granite 3 family, and offers IP indemnification when the model is consumed via watsonx — a strong default for regulated enterprise pilots that need a defensible weights-available alternative to hyperscaler frontier models. | Conditional Per the published Apache 2.0 LICENSE, the 1.08B-parameter weights carry no use restrictions and are well suited to on-device or edge deployments. Unusually for a Chinese-origin release, OpenBMB ships a full data card naming every pre-training and SFT corpus, which closes the AI Act Art. 53 transparency gap most peers leave open. The remaining hedge for regulated EU buyers is vendor jurisdiction (Tsinghua-affiliated lab, mainland China) — self-host the weights and treat any vendor-side service as out of scope. |
| Last reviewed | 2026-05-03 | 2026-05-30 |
| Open-weight | ||
| Licence | Apache 2.0 | Apache 2.0 |
| Commercial use | Unrestricted | Unrestricted |
| Training data | Disclosed | Documented |
| Origin | USA | China |
| Performance & pricing? | ||
| Quality index | 12/100 | — |
| Speed | 91 tok/s | — |
| Blended price | $0.06/M | — |
| Context window | — | — |
| Evidence | ||
| Sources | ||
No overlapping sources between the two entries.