Skip to content

DeepSeek R1 vs Phi-4

DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1

DeepSeek · 671B params · Quality: 92

Microsoft
Phi-4

Microsoft · 14.7B params · Quality: 83

Architecture Comparison

SpecDeepSeek R1Phi-4
TypeMOEDENSE
Total Parameters671B14.7B
Active Parameters37B14.7B
Layers6140
Hidden Dimension7,1685,120
Attention Heads12840
KV Heads110
Context Length131,07216,384
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Total Experts256N/A
Active Experts8N/A

Memory Requirements

PrecisionDeepSeek R1Phi-4
BF16 Weights1342.0 GB29.4 GB
FP8 Weights671.0 GB14.7 GB
INT4 Weights335.5 GB7.3 GB
KV-Cache / Token31232 B204800 B
Activation Estimate3.00 GB1.50 GB

Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)

H100 SXMN/A1 GPU
L40SN/A1 GPU

Quality Benchmarks

BenchmarkDeepSeek R1Phi-4
Overall9283
MMLU90.884.8
HumanEval71.767.0
GSM8K97.393.0
MT-Bench89.085.0

DeepSeek R1

MMLU
90.8
HumanEval
71.7
GSM8K
97.3
MT-Bench
89.0

Phi-4

MMLU
84.8
HumanEval
67.0
GSM8K
93.0
MT-Bench
85.0

Capabilities

FeatureDeepSeek R1Phi-4
Tool Use✓ Yes✓ Yes
Vision✗ No✗ No
Code✓ Yes✓ Yes
Math✓ Yes✓ Yes
Reasoning✓ Yes✓ Yes
Multilingual✓ Yes✓ Yes
Structured Output✓ Yes✓ Yes

API Pricing Comparison

Cheapest Output (DeepSeek R1)

$2.19/M

Input: $0.55/M

Cheapest Output (Phi-4)

$0.14/M

Input: $0.07/M

ProviderDeepSeek R1 In $/MOut $/MPhi-4 In $/MOut $/M
azure$0.07$0.14
together$3.00$7.00$0.20$0.20
deepseek$0.55$2.19

Recommendation Summary

  • DeepSeek R1 scores higher on overall quality (92 vs 83).
  • Phi-4 is cheaper per output token ($0.14/M vs $2.19/M).
  • Phi-4 has a smaller memory footprint (29.4 GB vs 1342.0 GB BF16), making it easier to deploy on fewer GPUs.
  • DeepSeek R1 supports a longer context window (131,072 vs 16,384 tokens).
  • DeepSeek R1 uses MOE architecture while Phi-4 uses DENSE. MoE models activate fewer parameters per token, improving inference efficiency.
  • DeepSeek R1 is stronger at code generation (HumanEval: 71.7 vs 67.0).
  • DeepSeek R1 is better at math reasoning (GSM8K: 97.3 vs 93.0).

Compare Other Models