Intel Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K and Core i5-14600K Review: Raptor Lake Refreshed

CPU Benchmark Performance: AI and Inferencing

As technology progresses at a breakneck pace, so too do the demands of modern applications and workloads. With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) becoming increasingly intertwined with our daily computational tasks, it's paramount that our reviews evolve in tandem. Recognizing this, we have AI and inferencing benchmarks in our CPU test suite for 2024. 

Traditionally, CPU benchmarks have focused on various tasks, from arithmetic calculations to multimedia processing. However, with AI algorithms now driving features within some applications, from voice recognition to real-time data analysis, it's crucial to understand how modern processors handle these specific workloads. This is where our newly incorporated benchmarks come into play.

As chip makers such as AMD with Ryzen AI and Intel with their Meteor Lake mobile platform feature AI-driven hardware within the silicon, it seems in 2024, and we're going to see many applications using AI-based technologies coming to market.

We are using DDR5 memory on the Core i9-14900K, Core i7-14700K, Core i5-14600K, and Intel's 13th Gen at the relative JEDEC settings. The same methodology is also used for the AMD Ryzen 7000 series and Intel's 12th Gen (Alder Lake) processors. Below are the settings we have used for each platform:

• DDR5-5600B CL46 - Intel 14th & 13th Gen
• DDR5-5200 CL44 - Ryzen 7000
• DDR5-4800 (B) CL40 - Intel 12th Gen

Note: As we are running with a completely refreshed CPU test suite, this means we are currently re-testing other processors for our data sets. These will be added to the below graphs as soon as we have more results, and these will also be added to our Bench database. Thanks for your understanding.

Digesting performance in the latest addition to our CPU test suite for 2024, it's clear that the extra L3 cache on the Ryzen 7000X3D processors has a clear benefit in ONNX when using the INT8 model. Even in ONNX with Super-Res-10, the AMD Ryzen CPUs seem to do a better job of inferencing than Intel. It does appear that more L3 cache can benefit performance in this area, and even in TensorFlow with VGG-16, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X seems to perform the best. Outside of that, the Core i9-14900K is next best, just marginally ahead of the Core i9-13900K. 

The Core i7-14700K performs respectively, and while the Core i5-14600K can certainly handle AI and inferencing, it doesn't offer quite the grunt of the Core i9 and Core i7 series chips.