Parakeet vs Whisper Turbo and Distil on CPU

We evaluated three Parakeet TDT 0.6B v3 configurations and two quantized Whisper variants on identical English reading audio using four CPU threads. On a 310.425-second recording, Parakeet FP32 with shorter chunks took 53.58 seconds with 2.81% word error rate (23 edits across 818 reference words) and 2.87 GiB peak process memory. Whisper Turbo INT8 took 343.26 seconds with 2.20% WER; Distil-Whisper INT8 took 279.10 seconds with 2.57% WER. Default Parakeet INT8 chunks omitted substantial speech; shorter chunks reduced WER from 39.12% to 4.65%. These single-request observations favor FP32 Parakeet for this CPU and sample, while the tested Whisper variants made fewer word edits. We publish all 18 completed runs, transcripts, fixture audio, references, checksums and reproduction settings.