Live data from Hacker News

Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

slashdot.org

1–10 of 63 posts

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#5
GeekBench probably made the right choice to optimize for more realistic real-world workloads than for the more specific workloads that benefit from really high core counts. GeekBench is supposed to be a proxy for common use case performance.

High core count CPUs are only useful for specific workloads and should not be purchased as general purpose fast CPUs. Unless you’re doing specific tasks that scale by core count, a CPU with fewer cores and higher single threaded throughput would be faster for normal use cases.

The callout against the poor journalism at Tom’s Hardware isn’t something new. They have a couple staff members posting clickbait all the time. Some times the links don’t even work or they have completely wrong claims. This is par for the site now.

To be fair, the Tom’s Hardware article did call out these points and the limitations in the article, so this SlashDot critique is basically repeating the content of the Tom’s Hardware article but more critically https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/apples-18-co...

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#6
post #4

Anyone who treats Geekbench as a meaningful benchmark (i.e. not without a huge disclaimer or with other more meaningful datapoints) is not to be trusted. You can only really trust it for inter-generational comparisons within a single architecture.

Since Geekbench 5, the single threaded benchmark scores have aligned pretty well with those from the industry standard SPEC benchmark.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#7
You're seriously posting to HN a link to your Slashdot post linking to your year-old blog post complaining about Geekbench 6's multi-threaded test without ever mentioning Amdahl's Law?

Pretending that everything a CPU does is an embarrassingly parallel problem is heinous benchmarking malpractice. Yes, Geekbench 6 has its flaws, and limitations. All benchmarks do. Geekbench 6 has valid uses, and its limitations are defensible in the context of using it to measure what it is intended to measure. The scalability limitations it illustrates are real problems that affect real workloads and use cases. Calling it "broken" because it doesn't produce the kind of scores a marketing department would want to see from a 96-core CPU reflects more poorly on you than it does on Geekbench 6.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#9
The strategy is to make outlandish claims and then have people "engaging" to "disprove" all of the claims. This strategy works as long as people are too apathetic and/or stupid to hold liars accountable. It works currently because journalism has significantly less value than tabloid drama to many people, some of which are just narrative shopping for a fun curated list of ideas (not facts) that fit their personalized echo chamber.

Re: Does Apple‘s M5 Max Really “Destroy” a 96-Core Threadripper?

#10

[flagged]

Phoronix is terrible in terms of clickbait and deliberate ragebait, and its comment section is a toxic cesspool, but its benchmarks generally seem sound. What issues have you observed with their benchmark suite?
Post reply on HN