Speech-to-text Measured by us
Whisper base on CPU only (Intel N100 mini-PC / x86 desktop)
We ran it. Results below, with the exact hardware and settings.
No GPU. Covers low-power N100 boxes up to desktop CPUs. Our own CPU numbers come from an 8 vCPU cloud Xeon, which is faster than an N100.
EvidenceMeasured by us
Commercial useYes
Licenseapache-2.0
Stated memory~1 GB VRAM
Device memory16 GB RAM
Results
| Runtime / settings | RTF | First-segment latency | Peak RAM | Load | WER* |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| faster-whisper base (int8, beam 5) | 0.0410 (24× real time) | 0.413 s | 443.0 MB | 3.64 s | 6.5% |
| whisper.cpp base (ggml fp16, beam 5, 8 threads, pywhispercpp) | 0.0786 (13× real time) | 0.793 s | 334.7 MB | 0.26 s | 3.2% |
Measured on Cloud x86 VM, 8 vCPU Intel Xeon, 16 GB RAM, no GPU (Intel(R) Xeon(R) Processor, 8 threads, Linux 6.12.94+, Python 3.13.5) on 2026-10-21. This is a cloud Xeon, not an N100: expect an N100 (4 cores, 6 W) to be several times slower. We'll post real N100 numbers when we have one. *WER on clean synthetic speech is a sanity check, not real-world accuracy.
Method
- Harness:
bench/run.py(open source), 5 timed runs after 1 warm-up, median reported. - Input: a 10.1 s English clip synthesized with Piper (en_US-lessac-medium), resampled to 16 kHz mono, language forced to English. First-segment latency = time until the first transcribed segment.
- RTF = wall-clock processing time ÷ audio duration (lower is faster). Model load time is reported separately, not included.
- Peak RAM = whole-process RSS sampled every 20 ms, including model weights.
- Machine: Cloud x86 VM, 8 vCPU Intel Xeon, 16 GB RAM, no GPU. No other benchmark ran at the same time; a browser was open on the same VM.
Ways to run Whisper base
Run it
pip install faster-whisper "av<16" # av 19 broke file decoding with faster-whisper 1.2.1 when we tested
python -c "from faster_whisper import WhisperModel; m=WhisperModel('base', device='cpu', compute_type='int8'); segs,_=m.transcribe('audio.wav', beam_size=5); print(' '.join(s.text for s in segs))"We ran this exact command on our test box on 2026-10-21.
Caveats
- Our CPU numbers come from an 8 vCPU cloud Xeon, which is several times faster than an Intel N100