Geekbench 7 • Hacker News Board

Re: Geekbench 7

#61

Post by sroussey » Fri, Jul 24, 2026, 7:56 PM UTC

jchw wrote: post #4

wtallis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Hmm, I don't fully agree. There are a whole lot of embarassingly parallel processes that people interested in many core workstations are interested in; compiling large C++ codebases for example tends to scale very well since each translation unit is independent. This is still going to not quite give you linear scaling so it's definitely still valuable to know what that looks like.

In that case, just assume linear scaling? You only need pay attention to a single core.

Re: Geekbench 7

#62

Post by captainbland » Fri, Jul 24, 2026, 8:01 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Geekbench 7

#63

Post by zamadatix » Tue, Jul 28, 2026, 5:30 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #52

zamadatix wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with whether it's an expert benchmark or not, even the dumpster fire that is UserBenchmark manages to show the three categories separately. It's just a bad practice among any kind of benchmark, basic or not. After all, the Geekbench is already doing the work needed during the tests.

Geekbench is not just intended to be used to benchmark consumer systems, it is intended to be used by consumers to benchmark their systems and to have its scores interpreted by consumers . For that audience, the most important thing that a multi-core score needs to do is counteract the naive assumption that a 20-core CPU will be twice as fast as a 10-core CPU. Having one of the top-line scores be a perfectly-scaling…

You start by saying it's used by the users and then end by saying it'd be abused by the vendors. You can't play both sides as reasons at the same time.

Besides, UserBenchmark is clearly intended to be used by users as well. It's right in the name. There has not been confusion with it, if anything labeling the scores as what they are instead of hiding it under how you want a user to see it is both clearer and avoiding benchmark malpractice - not the other way around.