For completeness of Intel Core i5-14400F processor tests we add the results of its second stepping. We’ve already tested the B0 variant, now it’s time for the C0. Its availability in stores is, at least at the moment, considerably worse and the question arises whether it is worth it at all. Is there any point in aiming for stepping C0 or is B0 also “okay”? Or does it “not matter” (what you get in the shopping lottery)?
Disclaimer: For big.LITTLE-based processors, there is a missing result in some tests. This is because they didn’t scale properly with P cores and the achieved performance was too low. In such cases it is indeed possible to force performance on all cores, but this does not happen by default at the user level. To avoid creating the illusion in some cases that measured results such as those presented in the graphs are normally achieved, we omit these. However, these are a negligible fraction of the total set of test results.
Average processor power draw
What is the explanation of the occasional erratic results? For instance, the first results for 3D mark: 14400F performs 6x better there than 14900k (and everything else)! I noticed similar weird results for multiple other tests as well. For example, in several graphics tests (gpu-based?), 12100 was the fastest one.
There may be several reasons. For a deeper analysis it is necessary to have an overview of the activity of all cores and the consumption for specific tests. We have this only for selected tests, for all tests it is impossible with such a large subset (of tests). We do not even do some tests for Intel processors with little and big cores and we do not include them in the graphs, because we know that the processor is not fully loaded and for example only little cores are used (there are boxes with a warning about this in all the result chapters that are concerned). In such cases we would, of course, measure significantly higher speed with the Ci3-12100F (with four P cores) than Ci5-14400F (with four E cores). In some subtests, the behavior with poor utilization of the P cores definitely occurs, and for example this can explain the things you are asking about. But of course there may be more explanations, and it is not possible to deal with every single situation in such a range of tests, and we can only speculate on the results in this way. 🙂
PS: Some, typically very short tests, are also affected by the speed with which a given processor can react to a change in CPU core(s) clock speeds (e.g. in a single-threaded load).
IMPRESSIVE review!!