Phi-4 vs DeepSeek R1
Architecture Comparison
SpecPhi-4DeepSeek R1
TypeDENSEMOE
Total Parameters14.7B671B
Active Parameters14.7B37B
Layers4061
Hidden Dimension5,1207,168
Attention Heads40128
KV Heads101
Context Length16,384131,072
Precision (default)BF16BF16
Total ExpertsN/A256
Active ExpertsN/A8
Memory Requirements
PrecisionPhi-4DeepSeek R1
BF16 Weights29.4 GB1342.0 GB
FP8 Weights14.7 GB671.0 GB
INT4 Weights7.3 GB335.5 GB
KV-Cache / Token204800 B31232 B
Activation Estimate1.50 GB3.00 GB
Minimum GPUs Needed (BF16)
H100 SXM1 GPUN/A
L40S1 GPUN/A
Quality Benchmarks
BenchmarkPhi-4DeepSeek R1
Overall8392
MMLU84.890.8
HumanEval67.071.7
GSM8K93.097.3
MT-Bench85.089.0
Phi-4
MMLU
84.8
HumanEval
67.0
GSM8K
93.0
MT-Bench
85.0
DeepSeek R1
MMLU
90.8
HumanEval
71.7
GSM8K
97.3
MT-Bench
89.0
Capabilities
FeaturePhi-4DeepSeek R1
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 (Phi-4)
$0.14/M
Input: $0.07/M
Cheapest Output (DeepSeek R1)
$2.19/M
Input: $0.55/M
| Provider | Phi-4 In $/M | Out $/M | DeepSeek R1 In $/M | Out $/M |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| azure | $0.07 | $0.14 | — | — |
| together | $0.20 | $0.20 | $3.00 | $7.00 |
| 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).
- ‣Phi-4 uses DENSE architecture while DeepSeek R1 uses MOE. 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).