[zigzag312]

It the end, what matters is real-world performance and different workloads have different bottlenecks. For people who use Cinema 4D, Cinebench is the most accurate measurement of hardware capabilities they can get. It's very hard to generalize what will matter for the vast majority of people. I find it's best to look at benchmarks for the same applications or similar workloads to what you'll be doing. Single score benchmark like Geekbench are fun and quick way to get some general idea about CPU capabilities, but most of the time they don't match specifics of real-world workloads.

Here's a content creation benchmark (note that for some tasks a GPU is also used):

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/mac-vs-pc-for-con...

[aurareturn]

Cinebench is being used like a general purpose CPU benchmark when, like you said, it should only be used to judge the performance of Cinema 4D. Cinema 4D is a niche software in a niche. Why is a niche in a niche software application being used to judge overall CPU performance? It doesn't make sense.

Meanwhile, Geekbench does run real world workloads using real world libraries. You can look at subtest scores to to see "real world" results.

Pugetsystem benchmarks are pretty good. It shows how Apple SoCs punch above their weight in real world applications over benchmarks.

Regardless, they are comparing desktop machines using as much as 1500 watts vs a laptop that maxes out at 80 watts and Apple is still competing well. The wins in the PC world are usually due to beefy Nvidia GPUs that are applications have historically optimized for.

That's why I originally said ARM is leading AMD - specifically Apple ARM chips.

[zigzag312]

Some Geekbench 6 workloads and libraries:

- Dijkstra's algorithm: not used by vast majority of applications.

- Google Gumbo: unmaintained since 2016.

- litehtml: not used by any major browser.

- Clang: common on HN, but niche for general population.

- 3D texture encoding: very niche.

- Ray Tracer: a custom ray tracer using Intel Embree lib. That's worse than Cinebench.

- Structure from Motion: generates 3D geometry from multiple 2D images.

It also uses some more commonly used libraries, but there's enough niche stuff in Geekbench that I can't say it's a good representation of a real world workloads.

> Regardless, they are comparing desktop machines using as much as 1500 watts vs a laptop that maxes out at 80 watts and Apple is still competing well. The wins in the PC world are usually due to beefy Nvidia GPUs that are applications have historically optimized for.

They included a laptop, which is also competing rather well with Apple offerings. And it's not PC's fault you can't add a custom GPU to Apple offerings.

[aurareturn]

Cinebench R23 was built on Intel Embree. ;)

You can cherry pick libraries that Geekbench 6 uses that are old or niche but do they do a good job as proxies?

The point of a general CPU benchmark is to predict CPU performance. For that, Geekbench does an outstanding job. [0]

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

[zigzag312]

> Cinebench R23 was built on Intel Embree. ;)

Yes, and the renderer is the same as in Cinema 4D which is used by many, while custom ray tracer build for Geekbench is not used outside benchmarking.

The blog post you linked just shows that one synthetic benchmark correlates with another synthetic benchmark. Where do SPEC CPU2006/2017 benchmarks guarantee or specify correlation with real-world performance workloads?

Cinebench fits characteristics of a good benchmark defined by SPEC [1]. It's not a general benchmark, but biased benchmark. It's floating-point intensive. It should do a perfect job of evaluating Cinema 4D rendering performance, a good job as proxy for other floating-point heavy workloads, but a poor job as proxy for other non-floating-point heavy workloads. The thing is, most real world workloads are biased. So, no single-score benchmark result can do an outstanding job of predicting CPU performance for everyone (which is what a general CPU benchmark with a single final score aims to do). They are useful, but limited in their prediction abilities.

[1] https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/Docs/overview.html#Q2

[aurareturn]

Cinebench is fine if you’re looking for how your cpu performs in cinema4d. The problem is users are using it as a general purpose cpu benchmark. It isn’t. It sucks at it.

SPEC is the industry standard for CPU benchmarking.