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Geekbench 7

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Re: Geekbench 7

#41

Post by miladyincontrol »

aurareturn wrote: post #36
thrownawaysz wrote: post #8

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 Geekbe…

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…

While I definitely agree about video decoding, encoding still is a valuable measure.

With inter-frame delivery codecs the hw encoder always focuses on speed, with a lean towards file size as well. It makes sense for most consumer use cases. 15x faster perhaps sure, but you might end up with a file almost 10x larger while still lower quality than a decent CPU encoding. Also the more off the beaten path of rec709 and rec2020 you go the less certain you can be that the hw encoder supports things.

Re: Geekbench 7

#42

Post by aurareturn »

jchw wrote: post #40
aurareturn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea why you're downvoted. Geekbench's focus is consumer workloads. In consumer workloads, having 20 cores or more is nearly useless. Most normal people will not need more than 8 in 2026. You're better off with a few fast cores over many slow cores. Geekbench isn't a server CPU benchmark that stresses 128 core CPUs.

I dunno why people are downvoting at all. I don't get what nerve this is striking so hard. The real truth is that if consumers don't benefit from knowing how well multicore workloads scale, then they can just look only at the single-core score. Skewing it on purpose by including things that genuinely only use ~1 core doesn't seem to serve to add value but only obfuscate the truth about how well a CPU is able to scale…

Given that Geekbench is a consumer workload benchmark, it makes sense to factor in Amdahl's Law. Period.

Now the question is whether having a 3rd CPU score for embarrassingly parallel work makes sense for Geekbench. It probably does since many professionals also use Geekbench nowadays.

Re: Geekbench 7

#43

Post by [deleted] »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #41
aurareturn wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While I definitely agree about video decoding, encoding still is a valuable measure. With inter-frame delivery codecs the hw encoder always focuses on speed, with a lean towards file size as well. It makes sense for most consumer use cases. 15x faster perhaps sure, but you might end up with a file almost 10x larger while still lower quality than a decent CPU encoding. Also the more off the beaten path of rec709 and r…

[deleted]

Re: Geekbench 7

#44

Post by jchw »

aurareturn wrote: post #42
jchw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno why people are downvoting at all. I don't get what nerve this is striking so hard. The real truth is that if consumers don't benefit from knowing how well multicore workloads scale, then they can just look only at the single-core score. Skewing it on purpose by including things that genuinely only use ~1 core doesn't seem to serve to add value but only obfuscate the truth about how well a CPU is able to scale…

Given that Geekbench is a consumer workload benchmark, it makes sense to factor in Amdahl's Law. Period. Now the question is whether having a 3rd CPU score for embarrassingly parallel work makes sense for Geekbench. It probably does since many professionals also use Geekbench nowadays.

> Given that Geekbench is a consumer workload benchmark, it makes sense to factor in Amdahl's Law. Period.

To be honest, they are factoring in Amdahl's law, because they're actually not only including embarrassingly parallel workloads, they're just not including ones where the speedup factor is roughly 0. Frankly I should have acknowledged this in my initial response.

> Now the question is whether having a 3rd CPU score for embarrassingly parallel work makes sense for Geekbench. It probably does since many professionals also use Geekbench nowadays.

Including workloads that are almost entirely single-threaded does not tell you anything about the "multi-core" performance of the processor. It just biases the multi-core score to be lower, period.

It is true that even without that, the multi-core score will still be biased towards the rough average speedup factor of all of the workloads combined, but that's just the nature of an aggregate benchmark. If you wanted to know how it would perform on a specific task, you'd need a specific benchmark anyways. If they've done a good job, the multi-core scores should still be useful for comparison across processors for your average multi-core workload.

I think two things are true:

- If consumers almost only ever use single threaded workloads, then the multi-core score will always be misleading to them if it is anything above what the single core score is. They should be paying more attention to the single-core score.

- If consumers do have multi-threaded workloads, then a multi-core score that averages in a bunch of tasks with no multi-core speedup will also not be representative for them, as it will understate the performance benefits they can see.

If you wanted a more useful third number it would be a weighted overall score, but what is the objectively correct weight between single and multi-core? Even for consumers this is a challenging number to come up with.

But I know one thing: it is almost certainly not whatever weight you just happen to wind up with by just arbitrarily including whatever number of single-threaded tasks your benchmark happens to have in a multi-core benchmark score.

Re: Geekbench 7

#45

Post by wmf »

aurareturn wrote: post #42
jchw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno why people are downvoting at all. I don't get what nerve this is striking so hard. The real truth is that if consumers don't benefit from knowing how well multicore workloads scale, then they can just look only at the single-core score. Skewing it on purpose by including things that genuinely only use ~1 core doesn't seem to serve to add value but only obfuscate the truth about how well a CPU is able to scale…

Given that Geekbench is a consumer workload benchmark, it makes sense to factor in Amdahl's Law. Period. Now the question is whether having a 3rd CPU score for embarrassingly parallel work makes sense for Geekbench. It probably does since many professionals also use Geekbench nowadays.

If they had an embarrassingly parallel test, Intel would be exclusively promoting that misleading number just like they do with Cinebench. Let's not create even more totally unrepresentative benchmarks.

Re: Geekbench 7

#46

Post by aurareturn »

wmf wrote: post #45
aurareturn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that Geekbench is a consumer workload benchmark, it makes sense to factor in Amdahl's Law. Period. Now the question is whether having a 3rd CPU score for embarrassingly parallel work makes sense for Geekbench. It probably does since many professionals also use Geekbench nowadays.

If they had an embarrassingly parallel test, Intel would be exclusively promoting that misleading number just like they do with Cinebench. Let's not create even more totally unrepresentative benchmarks.

I don't think Intel and AMD promote Cinebench as they used to back in the 2017-2023. Cinebnech 2024 actually heavily favors Apple.

Re: Geekbench 7

#48

Post by ksec »

thrownawaysz wrote: post #8

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 Geekbe…

>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.

Re: Geekbench 7

#49

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

aurareturn wrote: post #34
BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you want exists, it's called SPECint/SPECfp.

Geekbench 5 and 6 both correlated with SPEC scores at nearly 1:1. SPEC is the industry standard for CPU benchmarks. So in a way, Geekbench does what OP suggests which is a general measurement of performance. If you want to see specific areas, Geekbench shows sub scores. Here's research done by Nuvia before they were bought by Qualcomm: https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

What compiler is used by GB? Why can't I change it? Imagine an ICC-like scandal. Trusting binary-only benchmarks to compare hardware simply is foolish.

Re: Geekbench 7

#50

Post by BoingBoomTschak »

BoingBoomTschak wrote: post #32
GeekyBear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the loss of Anandtech, have any of the other tech websites started publishing SPEC results for systems they test?

https://chipsandcheese.com/

By the way, here's an interesting and very related comparison by them: https://chipsandcheese.com/p/evaluating-geekbench-6
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