[FlagsAreFun]

The current top results for single core performance are ~3,100 so it is, on paper, a substantial gain. The M3 in the iMac achieves around 3,053.

However, Geekbench is not that great (imo) so it does not necessarily indicate what you can expect overall performance to be or improve by between CPUs.

[aurareturn]

GB5 highly correlates with SPEC, which is the industry standard in CPU benchmarking.

The team at Nuvia, before they were acquired by Qualcomm, did the analysis: https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

[luyu_wu]

GB6 though is known (at least in the Chinese tech space) to heavily bias towards Apple chips in their synthetics.

[fh9302]

Can you share evidence of "heavy bias" towards Apple in GB6?

[luyu_wu]

Heya! Sorry, I would've added some links but I was on mobile and still am. As I hinted at, this is mostly coming from anecdotal wisdom I've heard. The hardest evidence seems to be Apple's chips increasing more (10-20%) in GB6 vs GB5 when compared to how much other manufacturers such as QLC and INTL increased. As another comment said, GB5 is well known to be quite accurate with SPEC (industry standard), thus this discrepancy with GB6 and GB5 is a bit concerning. Of course synthetics are always skewed (sometimes because a chipmaker tries, sometimes not), most famously Cinebench which has lost most credubility for favoring SIMD perf far too much.

Also might be worth it to check out the top comment to see an example of how a choice can bias syncthetics but not real-world.

[fh9302]

I would recommend reading the Geekbench 6 internals document, they explain the rational behind the change.

> Geekbench 6 uses a “shared task” model for multi-threading, rather than the “separate task” model used in earlier versions of Geekbench. The “shared task” approach better models how most applications use multiple cores.

> The "separate task" approach used in Geekbench 5 parallelizes workloads by treating each thread as separate. Each thread processes a separate independent task. This approach scales well as there is very little thread-to-thread communication, and the available work scales with the number of threads. For example, a four-core system will have four copies, while a 64-core system will have 64 copies.

> The "shared task" approach parallelizes workloads by having each thread processes part of a larger shared task. Given the increased inter-thread communication required to coordinate the work between threads, this approach may not scale as well as the "separate task" approach.

Nothing about this is biased towards Apple. GB6 simply scales worse with more cores due to increased inter-core communication requirements.

https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench6-benchmark-internals...

[aurareturn]

This is correct. AMD and Intel CPUs had many slower cores. GB5 made them look better. Apple has fewer cores but more fast ones.

Most applications can't utilize many cores. Thus, usually, consumer applications perform better with fewer but faster cores than many slow cores. Geekbench is a consumer CPU benchmark.

[luyu_wu]

Hallo! That was really interesting to read through! I just wanted to clarify that by bias I mean a skew towards one side that causes scores to misalign with SPEC. In this case, this bias against high-latency ICC is one of the causes of such 'bias'.

Thanks for the thoughtful and informative response though.

[DrStartup]

This should be the top comment