[aparashk]

It is more than likely that Geekbench will use CPUID to establish what it is running on, and then adjust its kernels to suit the host CPU architecture. Rosetta2 would be using a CPUID that excludes the AVX and any other Intel ISA extensions that it does not support, therefore, Geekbench should be running without issues on the fastest vector extension supported, most likely SSE3 or SSE4.x.

[thamer]

Right, that's also my guess. What I meant was that their document describing the v4 tests[1] mentions SSE and AVX, while the v5 version[2] does not. Does it mean that the v5 tests don't cover them? I found find it surprising for a benchmarking tool but they really were mentioned before and now they're not, hence my question.

If indeed v5 tests are not particularly about specialized performance but more about real-world use cases (e.g. PDF rendering, SQLite, image compression as others have mentioned) then running Geekbench v4 on M1+Rosetta would give a comparison of emulated x86 without vector instructions versus native x86 with all of its modern capabilities. Now if the M1 wins that…

[1] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf

[2] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf