Do those criticisms still hold? Are serious people nowadays taking Geekbench to be a reasonably okay (though obviously imperfect) performance metric?
Run the compilation on another CPU, note down the time it took and the Geekbench score for that CPU.
Now look at the ratios — if Geekbench scores implied the faster CPU was, say, 20% faster, is my compilation 20% faster?
I'm looking at my notes and without digging too much, I can see two reasonably recent cases: 30% faster compilation (Geekbench said 30%), and another one: 40% faster compilation (Geekbench said 38%).
So yes, I do consider Geekbench to be a very reliable indicator of performance.
This is M4 — Apple has now made four generations of chips and each one were class leading upon release. What more do you need to see?
If I was reviewing cars and used the number of doors as a benchmark for speed, surely I’d get laughed at.
Immediately people “but geEk BeNcH”
And then actual people get their hands on the machines for their real workloads and essentially confirm the geekbench results.
If this was the first time, then fair enough. But it’s a Groundhog Day style sketch comedy at this point with M4.
There is a lot to criticize about Apple's silicon design, but they are leading the CPU market in terms of mindshare and attention. All the other chipmakers all feel like they're just trying to follow Apple's lead. It's wild.
But anyway, what is it you see to criticize about Apple‘s Apple Silicon design? The way RAM is locked on package so it’s not upgradable, or something else?
I’m kind of surprised, I don’t hear a lot of people suggesting it has a lot to be criticized for.
It has 4 doors! It’s all over the shitty car news medias. The car is a prototype with only one seat though.
I was just curious if people had experience with how reliable Geekbench has been at showing relative performance of CPUs lately.
Buying up most of TSMC's latest node capacity certainly helps. Zen chips on the same node turn out to be very competitive, butAMD don't get first dibs.
People pretend like this isn’t a thing that’s already happened, and that there aren’t fair comparisons. But there are. And even when you compare like for like Apple Silicon tends to win.
Line up the node, check the wattages, compare the parts. I trust you can handle the assignment.
Nevertheless, product delivery is a combination of multiple things of which the basic tech is just one component.
Most people who say things like this tend to deeply misunderstand TDP and end up making really weird comparisons. Like high wattage desktop towers compared to fan-less MacBook Airs.
The process lead Apple tends to enjoy no doubt plays a huge role in their success. But you could also turn around and say that’s the only reason AMD has gained so much ground against Intel. Spoiler: it’s not. Process node and design work together for the results you see. People tend to get very stingy with credit for this though if there’s an Apple logo involved.
There is a sort of whack-a-mole thing where adherents of particular makers or even instruction sets dismiss evidence that benefits their alternatives, and you find that at the root of almost all of the "my choice doesn't win in a given benchmark means the benchmark is bad" rhetoric. Then they demand you only respect some oddball benchmark where their favoured choice wins.
AMD fans long claimed that Geekbench was in cahoots with Intel. Then when Apple started dominating, that it was in cahoots with ARM, or favoured ARM instruction sets. It's endless.
SPECint compiled with either the vendor compiler (ICC, AOCC) or the latest gcc/clang would be a good neutral standard, though I'd also want to compare SIMD units more closely with x265 and Highway based stuff (vips, libjxl).
And how do you handle the fact that you can't really (yet) use the same OS for both platforms? Scheduler and power management counts, even for dumb number crunching.
Specint, on the other hand, is useful for assessing specific tasks if you plan to run identical workloads. However, its individual test results vary widely. For example, Apple Silicon chips generally perform well in Specint but might match a competing chip in one test and be three times faster in another. These tests focus on very narrow tasks that can highlight the unique strengths of certain instructions or system features but are not representative of overall real-world performance.
The debate over benchmarks is endless and, frankly, exhausting, as it often rehashes the same arguments. In practice, most people accept that Geekbench is a reliable indicator of performance, and I maintain it’s an excellent benchmark. You might disagree, but my stance stands.
>Specint, on the other hand, is useful for assessing specific tasks if you plan to run identical workloads. [...] These tests focus on very narrow tasks that can highlight the unique strengths of certain instructions or system features but are not representative of overall real-world performance.
What? First, SPECint is an aggregate of 12 benchmarks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPECint#Benchmarks), none of them synthetic in any way. They're also ranging from low to high level, it's not just number crunching. Sure, it's missing stuff like browser benchmarks to better represent the average user, but it's certainly not as useless as what you seem to imply.
Any "system wide" benchmark is aggregating too much into a single number to mean anything, in any case.
And this subthread is about using benchmarks to compare HARDWARE, not whole systems, so this discussion is pretty much meaningless.
Yet a benchmark of how Xalan-C++ transforms XML documents has shockingly little relevance to most of the things I do. And the M1 runs the 400.perlbench benchmark slower than the 5950X, yet it runs the 456.hmmer benchmark twice as quickly, both I guess mattering if I'm running those specific programs?
As with the strawman that I said it was synthetic, I also didn't say it was useless. Not sure why you're making things. It's an interesting benchmark, but most people (yup, there's that appeal again) find Geekbench more informative.
And, again, most people, including the vast majority of experts in this field, respect geekbench as a decent broad-spectrum benchmark. As with all things there are always contrarians.
>And this subthread is about using benchmarks to compare HARDWARE, not whole system
Bizarre. This submission is specifically about Geekbench, specifically about the M4 running, of course, macOS. This subthread is someone noting that they can't escape the negatron contrarians who always pipe up with the No True Benchmark noise.
I'm skeptical of Geekbench being able to indicate that this specific new processor is robustly faster than say a 9950x in single-core workloads.
That's exactly their point.
Translating these scores into the real world is problematic. There are numerous examples of smart phones powered by Apple chips versus Qualcomm chips having starkly different performance with actual use. This is in spite of the chips themselves scoring similarly in benchmarks.
The interesting thing here isn't really how high it's scored against other chip brands, but how it outperformed the M2 Ultra. There was some hum of expectation on HN that the differences between M1, M2, M3 etc would be token and that Apple's chips devision is losing its touch. Yet the M2 Ultra in the Mac Studio was released in June 2023, and the M4 Pro in the mini now for November 2024. That is quite the jump in performance over time and a huge change in bang for buck.
If I could pick 1 "generic" benchmark to base things off of I'd pick PassMark though. It tends to agree with Geekbench on Apple Silicon performance but it is a bit more useful when comparing non-typical corner cases (high core count CPUs and the like).
Best of all is to look at a full test suite and compare for the specific workload types that matter to you... but that can often be overkill if all you want to know is "yep, Apple is pulling ahead on single thread performance".
But GB6 aligns pretty well with SPEC2017.