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  • Not great, but still probably better than Userbenchmark.

    If you ever want a cheeky laugh ask your llm of choice to write a satirical Userbenchmark amd review.

  • The CUDA addition (a vendor-specific API) is definitely a mistake.
  • I was hoping for a benchmark that specifically tests AI capabilities like tokens per second. I didn't even try Geekbench for my recent build because of it since none of the results would be relevant. I guess this is mainly a benchmark for video games and social media usage.
  • https://www.geekbench.com/ai/

    It focuses more on ML than LLMs though.

  • How does this handle hardware encode/decode of media? Tje announcement says it encodestdecodes AV1 but doesnt indicate if it leverages hardware codecs.
  • Slightly offtopic but where are we on Quake 1 timedemo with current hardware? Is it sub-second on modern machines?
  • The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)

  • I've run it on a couple Macs, and it looks like one of the issues they're trying to fix is poor multi-core scaling that affected Geekbench 6 on bigger multicore systems (with 32, 64, or 128+ CPU cores). I'll hopefully get time to test on my Ampere Altra Max systems later, to see how scaling works.

    Geekbench 5 is famously much better than Geekbench 6 for benchmarking these workstation-class CPUs (though many other benchmarks are better still, especially if you can grab the source code and compile them yourself).

    I still like having a set of benchmarks that run across Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux, and on Arm, X86, RISC-V, etc... even if imperfect, it's a point of reference to get a general feel. And the single core scores are a great representation of a 'feel' against baseline in day-to-day use.

  • Please stop framing the multi core scaling issue as a matter of the benchmark being good or bad. Geekbench 5 scores scale better than Geekbench 6 scores because Geekbench 5's multicore test runs N independent copies of the same workload while Geekbench 6 runs one workload that has to be split across the available cores, with non-zero coordination between threads.

    The Geekbench 5 approach of pretending Amdahl's Law doesn't exist is sometimes a valid benchmarking strategy, but generally is the wrong choice for benchmarking consumer workloads and devices, and that's what Geekbench is ostensibly targeting.

    The fact that Geekbench 6 scores don't increase linearly with the addition of more CPU cores is not a weakness of the benchmark, it's the benchmark demonstrating an important real-world effect.

    The change that Geekbench 7 makes to exclude some subtests from the multicore suite entirely will definitely have the effect of making the overall multicore score scale better with the addition of more cores, but most of the audience for those scores is going to miss out on the fact that the multicore test now measures a narrower range of tasks than the single-core test suite.

  • Never really liked Geekbench. Synthetic benchmarks are easy to use and easy to understand but borderline useless. 1000 is better than 990 but it literally doesn't mean anything at all. Just an example: the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable. And no one should get a 2017 Intel Xeon because it's scoring higher yet that's the whole point of Geekbench, higher score is better.

    Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.

    Some good benchmark options here https://hwbot.org/benchmarks

    https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...

  • AV1, Opus, Whisper, Jolt Physics... did you read the article? Are these not real?
    by wmf
  • To be honest I always got the sense that it had a sort of pro-Apple bias that doesn't seem to be reflected in real world applications.
  • What you want exists, it's called SPECint/SPECfp.
  • Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?

    You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.

  • >Never really liked Geekbench....

    As other have stated and perhaps worth pointing out clearly incase people don't get it. If you dislike Geekbench for those reasons, it is highly likely you don't know what Geekbench is testing in the first place.

    Personally I think Geekbench is a pretty damn good consumer testing benchmarks. I just wish there is something similar for Server testing PHP, Ruby, JVM, MySQL and Postrges etc.

    Can't wait to see all the M1 to M6 results. Along with AMD Zen 6.

    by ksec
  • Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.

    Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.

  •   Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
    
    I don't think so. First, Geekbench already shows sub scores for different types of applications.[0] Second, nearly no one uses CPU rendering for Cinebench and Blender. They're mostly GPU work. Video encoding/decoding work is mostly done by the media engine or GPU on Apple Silicon. Third, CPU benchmarks tend to correlate. If a CPU is faster in one thing, it's more likely to be faster in another. Therefore, a comprehensive score like what Geekbench and SPEC provide is valuable.

    Geekbench is extremely good at showing general CPU performance, especially ST. It's also highly correlated with SPEC at nearly 1:1 in terms of scores as shown by Nuvia before they were purchased by Qualcomm.[1]

    [0]https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18801240 scroll down

    [1]https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

  • > the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable

    Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?

    > Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.

    Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these