5 ms·

Geekbench 7

66 points by ilreb 3mo ago

geerlingguy 3mo ago
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.
- wtallis 3mo ago
  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.
  - jchw 3mo ago
    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.
    - osti 3mo ago
      You can use geekbench 5 in that case. But given that they deprecated that, it might be harder to compare to others.
    - wtallis 3mo ago
      Geekbench is not intended for benchmarking large workstations. Look at how the web site actually describes the benchmark. It's for phones and laptops and similar devices. A test mode that uses a machine in a way that is only relevant to high-end workstation or server use would be actively harmful to the suitability of Geekbench for its intended audience of consumer hardware and consumer users.
      - jchw 3mo ago
        Well, apparently they must not agree.
      - aurareturn 3mo ago
        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.
        jchw 3mo ago
        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 on multicore workloads, which does matter sometimes (like with modern video games.) Yes this means that 128 core Xeon servers will maybe look especially good, but idk, what consumer hardware has 128 cores? Consumers are not considering a Mac Mini versus a fucking NVIDIA Vera rack, you know? I fully accept that you could view it either way, but if you're going to have a multicore score at all, in my opinion, it may as well actually show you what multicore workloads look like. It is OK that consumers can't necessarily understand how this translates. If all they ever do is single core workloads, they will never have any benefit to looking at the multicore workload score for any Geekbench score on any Geekbench version, because otherwise the multicore score overstates the performance, whereas if they were to look at a version that has multicore including ~single threaded workloads, it would understate the multicore scaling. Benchmarks are necessarily imperfect no matter how you shake it. For example, it is impossible for a general compute benchmark to show how much better the UX of two cores is over having just one core that is a bit faster. Though, now that I say all of this, I get the strange feeling the nerve it's striking is fanboyism. What else would make people care this much, but perhaps the hardware vendor they are fans of showing up higher in the numbers? Well it ain't me. I couldn't care less how Apple and AMD and Intel compare in the Geekbench scores. Could be wrong, but somehow this just feels like a good bet.
cosmotic 3mo ago
How does this handle hardware encode/decode of media? Tje announcement says it encodestdecodes AV1 but doesnt indicate if it leverages hardware codecs.
thrownawaysz 3mo ago
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://hwbot.org/benchmarks https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-in_benchmarks https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...
- dijit 3mo ago
  a 2017 Xeon can absolutely smoke an M1.. (double the FP64 units, AVX-512; huge per core caches, boatloads of I/O lanes and RAM...) .. but it chugs power like it's not even funny. I do like synthetic benchmarks as one input signal when evaluating a CPU; otherwise we go back to stupid numbers like frequency... which also never made sense because they had 1.8GHz AMD Athlon CPUs outperforming 2.4GHz Pentium 4's in 2002-3... Doing a lot of real-world application testing is good, but there's always some you miss, and the worst part about it is that people start to lose patience when assessing.. How is a cinebench comparing to doing gamedev in UE5? How is doing gamedev in UE5 comparing to doing gamedev in Snowdrop? How does doing gamedev in Snowdrop compare to doing virtualisation (different CPUs handling that particular task better than others). there's so many dimensions that it will always be true that there's not enough testing. I'm not saying we shouldn't have rigorous testing like you say, in fact, what I'm actually saying is that "single number→would you like to go deeper" is a better pipeline than an excel spreadsheet that goes on for 10 pages (which still skips a bunch of nuance) and still better than one that goes on for 500 pages with a broad spectrum of topics. The reason I'm so bitter about this is because outlets like LTT and Gamers Nexus seem to choose their games randomly (based on popularity I guess?) and so all the titles I worked on kinda got smeared by my "company"- but our games used hugely different game engines that work differently (Dunia vs Snowdrop handle CPUs... VERY differently. Snowdrop is built for multi-core. Anvil works best on a single core, and Dunia has trouble going passed 4 cores- so on large systems with multiple NUMA zones the performance is.. worse. So the "battery of tests" always gave us a shitty score and reviewers just moved on believing themselves to be comprehensive arbiters of truth regarding performance and giving verdicts regarding the performance of games as a broad topic (which people take and don’t dig deeper themselves) and without regard to the utility of what they’re saying (500+ fps on CSGO isn't even renderable for example). People might have been better served by looking broadly at how powerful the CPUs actually are and then digging in for their use case once they whittle a few down, because then also: developers will actually make software that tries to use the features on offer instead of assuming people will just buy CPUs that work better on their workloads. It's a kind of "to big to fail" mentality where incumbents start being able to direct CPU sales based on those CPUs being optimised for their workloads. It's self-reinforcing.
kittikitti 3mo ago
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.
- aurareturn 3mo ago
  https://www.geekbench.com/ai/ https://www.geekbench.com/ai/ It focuses more on ML than LLMs though.
miladyincontrol 3mo ago
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.
NSUserDefaults 3mo ago
Slightly offtopic but where are we on Quake 1 timedemo with current hardware? Is it sub-second on modern machines?
- RachelF 3mo ago
  The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)
snvzz 3mo ago
The CUDA addition (a vendor-specific API) is definitely a mistake.

66 points by ilreb 3mo ago

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.

wtallis 3mo ago
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.
- jchw 3mo ago
  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.
  - osti 3mo ago
    You can use geekbench 5 in that case. But given that they deprecated that, it might be harder to compare to others.
  - wtallis 3mo ago
    Geekbench is not intended for benchmarking large workstations. Look at how the web site actually describes the benchmark. It's for phones and laptops and similar devices. A test mode that uses a machine in a way that is only relevant to high-end workstation or server use would be actively harmful to the suitability of Geekbench for its intended audience of consumer hardware and consumer users.
    - jchw 3mo ago
      Well, apparently they must not agree.
    - aurareturn 3mo ago
      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.
      - jchw 3mo ago
        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 on multicore workloads, which does matter sometimes (like with modern video games.) Yes this means that 128 core Xeon servers will maybe look especially good, but idk, what consumer hardware has 128 cores? Consumers are not considering a Mac Mini versus a fucking NVIDIA Vera rack, you know? I fully accept that you could view it either way, but if you're going to have a multicore score at all, in my opinion, it may as well actually show you what multicore workloads look like. It is OK that consumers can't necessarily understand how this translates. If all they ever do is single core workloads, they will never have any benefit to looking at the multicore workload score for any Geekbench score on any Geekbench version, because otherwise the multicore score overstates the performance, whereas if they were to look at a version that has multicore including ~single threaded workloads, it would understate the multicore scaling. Benchmarks are necessarily imperfect no matter how you shake it. For example, it is impossible for a general compute benchmark to show how much better the UX of two cores is over having just one core that is a bit faster. Though, now that I say all of this, I get the strange feeling the nerve it's striking is fanboyism. What else would make people care this much, but perhaps the hardware vendor they are fans of showing up higher in the numbers? Well it ain't me. I couldn't care less how Apple and AMD and Intel compare in the Geekbench scores. Could be wrong, but somehow this just feels like a good bet.

cosmotic 3mo ago

How does this handle hardware encode/decode of media? Tje announcement says it encodestdecodes AV1 but doesnt indicate if it leverages hardware codecs.

thrownawaysz 3mo ago

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://hwbot.org/benchmarks https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-in_benchmarks https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...

dijit 3mo ago
a 2017 Xeon can absolutely smoke an M1.. (double the FP64 units, AVX-512; huge per core caches, boatloads of I/O lanes and RAM...) .. but it chugs power like it's not even funny. I do like synthetic benchmarks as one input signal when evaluating a CPU; otherwise we go back to stupid numbers like frequency... which also never made sense because they had 1.8GHz AMD Athlon CPUs outperforming 2.4GHz Pentium 4's in 2002-3... Doing a lot of real-world application testing is good, but there's always some you miss, and the worst part about it is that people start to lose patience when assessing.. How is a cinebench comparing to doing gamedev in UE5? How is doing gamedev in UE5 comparing to doing gamedev in Snowdrop? How does doing gamedev in Snowdrop compare to doing virtualisation (different CPUs handling that particular task better than others). there's so many dimensions that it will always be true that there's not enough testing. I'm not saying we shouldn't have rigorous testing like you say, in fact, what I'm actually saying is that "single number→would you like to go deeper" is a better pipeline than an excel spreadsheet that goes on for 10 pages (which still skips a bunch of nuance) and still better than one that goes on for 500 pages with a broad spectrum of topics. The reason I'm so bitter about this is because outlets like LTT and Gamers Nexus seem to choose their games randomly (based on popularity I guess?) and so all the titles I worked on kinda got smeared by my "company"- but our games used hugely different game engines that work differently (Dunia vs Snowdrop handle CPUs... VERY differently. Snowdrop is built for multi-core. Anvil works best on a single core, and Dunia has trouble going passed 4 cores- so on large systems with multiple NUMA zones the performance is.. worse. So the "battery of tests" always gave us a shitty score and reviewers just moved on believing themselves to be comprehensive arbiters of truth regarding performance and giving verdicts regarding the performance of games as a broad topic (which people take and don’t dig deeper themselves) and without regard to the utility of what they’re saying (500+ fps on CSGO isn't even renderable for example). People might have been better served by looking broadly at how powerful the CPUs actually are and then digging in for their use case once they whittle a few down, because then also: developers will actually make software that tries to use the features on offer instead of assuming people will just buy CPUs that work better on their workloads. It's a kind of "to big to fail" mentality where incumbents start being able to direct CPU sales based on those CPUs being optimised for their workloads. It's self-reinforcing.

kittikitti 3mo ago

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.

aurareturn 3mo ago
https://www.geekbench.com/ai/ https://www.geekbench.com/ai/ It focuses more on ML than LLMs though.

miladyincontrol 3mo ago

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.

NSUserDefaults 3mo ago

Slightly offtopic but where are we on Quake 1 timedemo with current hardware? Is it sub-second on modern machines?

RachelF 3mo ago
The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)

snvzz 3mo ago

The CUDA addition (a vendor-specific API) is definitely a mistake.