Based on TFLOP comparisons, with the 11B model, we saw even more payoff from the optimizations.  Mixed precision(~10x improvement) and activation checkpointing (~100x improvement) had a much larger impact with the 11B model compared to the 3B parameter model. With mixed precision we could fit ~2x larger batch sizes and with activation checkpointing >15x batch sizes (from 3 with no activation checkpointing to 50 with activation checkpointing) which translated into large throughput improvements.
We also have observed that for these larger models > 3B, using Zero2 sharding strategy would result in minimal room left in memory for the batch data, and had to go with very small batch sizes (e.g 1-2) that essentially makes full sharding strategy a necessity to enable fitting larger batches sizes.