Geekbench 7

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://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Some good benchmark options here https://hwbot.org/benchmarks

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...

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

  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 shows sub scores which is similar to those applications you mentioned. Second, nearly no one uses CPU rendering for Cinebench and Blender. They're mostly GPU work. Video encoding/decoding work is mostly done by the media engine or GPU on Apple Silicon. Third, CPU benchmarks tend to correlate. If one CPU is faster in one thing, it's more likely to be faster in another. Therefore, a comprehensive score like what Geekbench and SPEC provide is valuable. If you want specific applications, look at the Geekbench subscores.

Geekbench is extremely good at showing general CPU performance, especially ST. It's also highly correlated with SPEC at nearly 1:1 in terms of scores as shown by Nuvia before they were purchased by Qualcomm.[0]

[0]https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

> the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable

Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?

> 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.

Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these

Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.

Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.

Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?

You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.

AV1, Opus, Whisper, Jolt Physics... did you read the article? Are these not real?

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

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.

The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)

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.

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

Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.

Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.

  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.

[0]https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

https://www.geekbench.com/ai/

It focuses more on ML than LLMs though.

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.

I agree. For me personally I mostly only care about single thread geekbench variant, I believe it's an excellent proxy for general performance of a CPU. Multi thread geekbench (or other benchmarks) for most purposes and for most people, it's kinda useless. You just need to know that you have a quite a few cores on your computer and that it will have enough concurrency for what you do. But single thread will make whatever you do actually faster.

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.

They do mention that the change is meant to reflect how real world programs handle various types of workloads.

> In Geekbench 7, a workload only runs in multi-threaded mode if the task it models actually runs multi-threaded in real applications. For example, the HTML5 Browser test isn’t included in the multi-threaded suite because web browsers are single-threaded (or lightly threaded).

It bothers me because there is no reason it can't just give 3 results: single, mixed/low thread, all core and yet there is often debate on which 2 numbers in such benchmarks instead.

But, of all of the 2-pick-only options, choosing a custom mix and calling it multi-core requires guessing your actual workload on both the content of the mixed test suite as well as the scaling profile of the CPU to reason with. On the other hand, just testing "single core" and "all core" at least only requires you to guess based on what you think the scaling profile of the CPU is.

Nothing beats just testing your actual workload, but that doesn't mean all other ways of testing have to be equally good.

Honestly I think the world would be better off if Geekbench just refused to run on any machine over 28C. Then people could benchmark their workstations using... workstation benchmarks.

The original timedemo was how fast Sopwith game from 1984 crashed the plane:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sopwith_(video_game)

> the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable

Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?

Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these

In the past, they have provided information on which workloads they use.

For instance, the file compression workload on version 6:

This workload compresses and decompresses the Ruby 3.1.2 source archive (a 75 MB archive with 9,841 files) using different compression codecs (such as LZ4 and ZSTD). It also verifies the files using the SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) function.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-cpu-workloads.pdf

AV1, Opus, Whisper, Jolt Physics... did you read the article? Are these not real?

Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?

You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.geekbench.com/ai/

It focuses more on ML than LLMs though.

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-...

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

Honestly I think the world would be better off if Geekbench just refused to run on any machine over 28C. Then people could benchmark their workstations using... workstation benchmarks.

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.

You can use geekbench 5 in that case. But given that they deprecated that, it might be harder to compare to others.

They do mention that the change is meant to reflect how real world programs handle various types of workloads.

Yes, they have a valid reason for the change. But I think it's still making a tradeoff, and has a clearly identifiable downside because the content of the multi-core test suite is no longer as closely aligned with the content of the single-core test suite.

(One could just as easily argue that the single-core test suite ought to exclude any task typically done with multiple threads in real-world usage.)

It bothers me because there is no reason it can't just give 3 results: single, mixed/low thread, all core and yet there is often debate on which 2 numbers in such benchmarks instead.

Nothing beats just testing your actual workload, but that doesn't mean all other ways of testing have to be equally good.

> But, of all of the 2-pick-only options, choosing a custom mix and calling it multi-core requires guessing your actual workload on both the content of the mixed test suite as well as the scaling profile of the CPU to reason with.

Yes, that's pretty much the whole point of Geekbench: to offer non-experts a way to measure CPU performance and produce scores that are relevant to a specific class of devices and users and use cases, rather than artificially inflated.

Benchmarking experts can already use something like SPEC, which does offer single-thread and both types of multi-thread test modes (SPECrate and SPECspeed).

In the past, they have provided information on which workloads they use.

For instance, the file compression workload on version 6:

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-cpu-workloads.pdf

Here's research done by Nuvia before they were bought by Qualcomm: https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

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

Phoronix, I've at least seen it on Epyc Reviews iirc.

You can use geekbench 5 in that case. But given that they deprecated that, it might be harder to compare to others.

(One could just as easily argue that the single-core test suite ought to exclude any task typically done with multiple threads in real-world usage.)

Benchmarking experts can already use something like SPEC, which does offer single-thread and both types of multi-thread test modes (SPECrate and SPECspeed).

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.

Well, apparently they must not agree.

Thanks for finding that.

> The Clang workload uses the Clang compiler to compile the Lua interpreter, a popular open-source language interpreter.

People really shouldn't call Geekbench a synthetic benchmark anymore, since it has been using real world workloads for years now.

Geekbench isn't a server CPU benchmark that stresses 128 core CPUs.

Phoronix, I've at least seen it on Epyc Reviews iirc.

Well, apparently they must not agree.

Thanks for finding that.

> The Clang workload uses the Clang compiler to compile the Lua interpreter, a popular open-source language interpreter.

People really shouldn't call Geekbench a synthetic benchmark anymore, since it has been using real world workloads for years now.

If memory serves, it has been since version 4 or 5 that they started including real workloads. I agree that it shouldn’t be considered synthetic any more.

Geekbench 7, the latest version of Primate Labs’ cross-platform benchmark, has arrived and features both new and improved workloads to measure the performance of your CPUs and GPUs. Geekbench 7 is available for download today for Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Geekbench 7 for Windows screenshot

Geekbench 7 on Windows 11

Geekbench 7 includes new media workloads that measure how well your CPU handles audio and video encoding, decoding, and processing. The workloads model the tasks behind video conferencing, screen sharing, and everyday content consumption. These new workloads:

Encode screen-sharing video with the AV1 codec, modeling the screen-sharing features in video conferencing apps.
Compress music and spoken-word audio with the Opus codec, modeling voice memo and podcast apps.
Decode video and audio while generating live captions with the Whisper speech recognition model, modeling video playback with automatic subtitles enabled.

Alongside the new media workloads, Geekbench 7 adds a Game Physics workload built on the Jolt Physics engine used in popular video games, expands the Photo Editor workload with a richer set of real-world edits, and updates the Photo Library workload to support importing and processing modern image formats such as JPEG XL and DNG.

A Smarter Multi-Core Benchmark

The multi-core benchmark in Geekbench 7 has been redesigned to better reflect how real applications behave. Not every task in the real world is multi-threaded, and pretending otherwise distorts scores without telling you anything useful about your device.

In Geekbench 7, a workload only runs in multi-threaded mode if the task it models actually runs multi-threaded in real applications. For example, the HTML5 Browser test isn’t included in the multi-threaded suite because web browsers are single-threaded (or lightly threaded).

The result is a multi-core score that’s a more accurate, more useful, and more relevant measure of how your device performs the work you actually do.

A Refreshed GPU Benchmark

The GPU benchmark has a new focus on the machine learning and content creation applications that increasingly define GPU performance. For machine learning, the GPU benchmark includes workloads that:

Track faces and apply real-time filter effects to video, modeling the face filters in social media apps.
Upscale images with machine learning, modeling super resolution features in content creation apps.
Blur backgrounds in video conferencing streams, modeling virtual background features in video conferencing apps.

Geekbench 7 also introduces new GPU image editing and synthesis workloads, including RAW image processing, LUT-based video color grading, path tracing, and fluid simulation.

And by popular demand, CUDA joins OpenCL, Vulkan, and Metal as a supported API in the GPU Benchmark. You can now measure your NVIDIA GPU using the API that powers its most demanding applications.

Larger Data Sets

Since the release of Geekbench 6, the tasks people perform have become more strenuous, and the data sets they use have grown larger and more demanding. To reflect this, we’ve updated the data sets the workloads process so they’re more challenging for your device and better reflect the files people work with today. This includes:

More (and more varied) archives in the File Compression workload, spanning source code, object code, and text documents.
More (and more varied) documents in the PDF Viewer workload, from park maps to technical documents to academic papers.
More assets and different image formats throughout the developer and image processing workloads.

Launch Sale

Geekbench 7 is free (and will remain free) for personal use. Download it today and see how your devices measure up.

We’re celebrating the launch with 20% off Geekbench 7 Pro on the Primate Labs Store until August 6. Whether you’re a tech enthusiast researching your next upgrade or an IT professional managing a fleet of machines, there’s never been a better time to find out what your hardware can really do.

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