[refulgentis]

I think this actually concedes the main criticism.

If Geekbench 6 multicore is primarily a proxy for “common use case performance” rather than for workloads that actually use lots of cores, then it shouldn’t be treated as a general multicore CPU benchmark, and it definitely shouldn’t be the basis for sweeping 18-core vs 96-core conclusions.

That may be a perfectly valid design choice. But then the honest takeaway is: GB6 multicore measures a particular class of lightly/moderately threaded shared-task workloads, not broad multicore capability.

The criticism isn’t “every workload should scale linearly to 96 cores.” It’s that a benchmark labeled “multicore” is being used as if it were a general multicore proxy when some of its workloads stop scaling very early, including ones that sound naturally parallelizable.

[wtallis]

Geekbench 6 isn't really marketed as a one-size-fits-all benchmark. It's specifically aimed at consumer hardware. The first paragraph on geekbench.com reads:

> Geekbench 6 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures your system's performance with the press of a button. How will your mobile device or desktop computer perform when push comes to crunch? How will it compare to the newest devices on the market? Find out today with Geekbench 6.

And further down,

> Includes updated CPU workloads and new Compute workloads that model real-world tasks and applications. Geekbench is a benchmark that reflects what actual users face on their mobile devices and personal computers.

[refulgentis]

The problem is, in practice, despite nonspecific marketing language, people do use the multicore benchmark to measure multicore performance. Including for things like Threadripper, which is not exactly an exotic science project CPU or non-personal or non-desktop.

[wtallis]

> Including for things like Threadripper, which is not exactly an exotic science project CPU or non-personal or non-desktop.

We're talking about a CPU with a list price over $10000.

Geekbench 6 is a bad test to use to assess the suitability of a 96-core Threadripper for the kinds of use cases where buying a 96-core Threadripper might make sense. But Geekbench 6 does a very good job of illustrating the point that buying a 96-core Threadripper would be a stupid waste of money for a personal desktop and the typical use cases of a personal desktop.

[refulgentis]

Holy hell. Lol. I did not realize how generous $PREVIOUS_EMPLOYER was.

[Aurornis]

> then it shouldn’t be treated as a general multicore CPU benchmark,

It is a general multi core benchmark for its target audience.

It’s not marketed as “the multi core scaling benchmark”. Geekbench is advertised as a benchmark suite and it has options to run everything limited to a single core or to let it use as many cores as it can.

96-core CPUs are not its target audience.