You’re not going to run deepseek r1 without GPUs (plural).

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3639vs5957/Intel-i9-10940X-vs-Intel-i9-14900KS

The new one is significant more powerful, and almost certainly has better efficiency.

I would just verify that your OS properly supports P/E cores.

In my experience, idle power consumption mainly depends on the mainboard used. The processors all(?) clock down to some more or less energy-efficient level. But the specific design of the mainboard and the components on it could double or half energy consumption.

If you’ll be running Linux and trying to use steam to run games, at all, avoid the 14th gen is.

If not, the 14th gen i9 is your bet.

Something with Proton, the layer that makes steam work with Linux, has been causing tons of people a lot of grief myself included. Any games that rely heavily on vulkan shaders will cause my whole system to crash under heavy load. It’s a known thing and Intel still seems clueless as to what to do to resolve it, afaik.

Need max AVX instructions. Anything with P/E cores is junk. Only enterprise P cores have the max AVX instructions. When P/E are mixed the advanced AVX is disabled in microcode because the CPU scheduler is unable to determine if a process thread contains an AVX instruction and there is no asymmetrical scheduler that handles this. Prior to early 12k series Intel, the microcode for P enterprise could allegedly run if swapped manually. This was “fused off” to prevent it, probably because Linux could easily be adapted to asymmetrical scheduling but Windows would probably not. The whole reason W11 had to be made was because of the E-cores and the way the scheduler and spin up of idol cores works, at least according to someone on Linux Plumbers for the CPU scheduler ~2020. There are already asymmetric schedulers in Android ARM.

Anyways I think it was on Gamer’s Nexus in the last week or two that Intel was doing some all P core consumer stuff. I’d look at that. According to chips and cheese, the primary CPU bottleneck for tensors is the bus width and clock management of the L2 to L1 cache.

I do alright with my laptop, but haven’t tried R1 stuff yet. The 70B llama2 stuff that I ran was untenable for CPU only with a 12700 with just CPU. It is a little slower than my reading pace when split with a 16 GB GPU, and that was running a 4 bit quantization version.

I can’t speak to AI performance, but given you’re stated goal of lower idle power consumption, I’d go with the 14900K, not the KS as you have listed.

Reason being the $250 price difference between the two, when the KS is just a slightly higher binning of the K with an additional 200MHz on the boost clocks. With that higher boost being something you’re unlikely to practically see without a substantial and robust cooling system, I don’t think it’s worth the extra money.

The reason I’d go with the K over the 10940X is the lower limit on it’s power consumption. The E cores are very efficient and can down clock substantially meaning it idles at really low power. The 10940X doesn’t have that benefit.

Beyond that, I’d say look at IPC, per thread, per max sustainable clock of each core, to get a general out look on performance.

Note: all of the above assumes we’re working within your listed options. My actual recommendation would be an AMD 7800x3d or 9800x3d.