logoalt Hacker News

tom_yesterday at 12:39 PM2 repliesview on HN

Judging by my PCs (M4 Max Mac Studio; 2990WX desktop PC), Geekbench might flatter the Apple chips for multicore a bit I think:

Geekbench 7 results:

* AMD 2990WX: 1384 (single), 13052 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/181239)

* Apple M4 Max: 3552 (single), 29863 (multi) (https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/390256)

For parallelisable stuff that can occupy all cores for an extended period, the 2990WX typically takes about ~1.2x as long to do the same work/does ~0.83x the work per unit time, assuming code compiled with clang or gcc. Which isn't really coming across in the numbers here.

CPUMark is a bit better:

* AMD 2990WX: 2282 (single), 32040 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Ryzen+Threadrip...)

* Apple M4 Max: 4590 (single), 43911 (multi) (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M4+Max+16+Cor...)

I haven't spent much time timing single core stuff, except - regarding clang, which looks like it contributes to the Geekbench 7 score, I did some measurements a few months ago suggesting that clang compiles for x64 more slowly than for ARM, all else being as equal as I could be bothered to try to make it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46938682 - and the single threaded test runs I did of my code suggest that the Geekbench 7 single core might be about right?

(Whether the clang timing discrepancy is actually relevant to Geekbench, I've no idea, but I thought it interesting anyway.)

If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.


Replies

bob1029yesterday at 1:24 PM

> If you need a benchmark that makes the PC look massively faster than the Mac, I'm sure those are available too.

Go check out blender CPU scores if you need any reassurance that AMD still makes some kind of sense.

https://opendata.blender.org/benchmarks/query/?compute_type=...

jltsirenyesterday at 8:51 PM

Geekbench multi-core has been a single-task benchmark since version 6. The multi-core / single-core score ratio is supposed to tell how much you will benefit on the average when you use all available CPU cores. Some tasks parallelize better, while others have bottlenecks that prevent effective parallelization. For every CPU, the ratio is well below the nominal speedup you can get under ideal circumstances.

show 1 reply