First off, you probably don't want instances at 45-60% cpu. In that case, if you get a traffic spike, all of your instances will choke.
Next, 14 Unicorn instances seems large. Unicorn does not use threading. Rather, each process runs with a single thread. Unicorn's master process will only select
a thread if it is able to handle it. Because of this, the number of cores isn't a metric you should use to measure performance with Unicorn.
A more conservative setup may use 4 or so Unicorn processes per instance, responding to maybe 5-8 requests per second. Then, adjust the number of instances until your CPU use is around 35%. This will ensure stability under the stressful '20 requests per second scenario.'
Lastly, you can get more gritty stats and details by using God
.