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aurareturn • last Thursday at 11:17 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

  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 already shows sub scores for different types of applications.[0] 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 a 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.

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.[1]

[0]https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/18801240 scroll down

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

Replies

miladyincontrol • yesterday at 12:18 AM

While I definitely agree about video decoding, encoding still is a valuable measure.

With inter-frame delivery codecs the hw encoder always focuses on speed, with a lean towards file size as well. It makes sense for most consumer use cases. 15x faster perhaps sure, but you might end up with a file almost 10x larger while still lower quality than a decent CPU encoding. Also the more off the beaten path of rec709 and rec2020 you go the less certain you can be that the hw encoder supports things.

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