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...

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.

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.

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.

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