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by seec
476 days ago
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This is my experience as well. Geekbench heavily favors the type of workload that runs best on Apple hardware (those tends to be general case, most likely to be used by the mass) but in practice if you have complex software to run your experience will not match the bench numbers. I think PassMark is more honest as well, because it just gives scores for calculation throughput instead of specific tasks. It more closely matches what experience you will get if you have a varied load. But since it's Apple we are talking about, their users just want to think they have the best and that's all that matters. |
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https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_test_info.html
Right from the top it's amateurish stuff: their idea of an integer benchmark to measure "raw" CPU throughput (whatever that means) is to make a bunch of random ints and add/subtract/multiply/divide them.
Very few programs do a high volume of either integer multiply or divide. And when they do, they generally aren't doing it on random numbers. This is the kind of thing which gives synthetic benchmarks their highly deserved bad rep. It might be even worse than Dhrystone MIPs, and believe me, in benchmark nerd circles, that is a fucking diss.
If you look up Geekbench's docs, you'll find that it's all about real-world compute tasks. For example, one of the int tests in their suite is to compile a reference program with the Clang compiler. Compilers are a reasonably good litmus test of integer performance; they heavily stress the CPU features most responsible for high integer performance in this day and age. (Branch prediction, memory prefetching, out-of-order execution, speculation, that kind of thing.)
You claimed that PassMark reflects "complex" software, and Geekbench doesn't. However, I would be willing to bet that Clang alone is far more complex than all of PassMark's CPU benchmarks put together, whether you measure by SLOC or program structure.
Note that none of this has anything to do with Mac vs PC. Passmark is simply a bad benchmark that should not be used, period. That said, there are a bunch of warning signs that PassMark's ports to everything outside its native x86 Windows are probably quite sloppy, so it's even less useful for crossplatform comparisons.