Evaluating Geekbench 6

Applications vary wildly in what they demand from a system, making it difficult for a single benchmark to provide a broadly representative score. Benchmark suites try to address this by running a set of workloads that hopefully capture a range of typical application behavior. SPEC CPU2017 is an industry standard benchmark suite that dates back to 1989. Geekbench is another suite with a more recent history, going back to around 2010 if I remember correctly. Unlike SPEC CPU2017, Geekbench has a strong consumer focus. It’s distributed in binary form like most consumer applications, rather than source code form like SPEC CPU2017. Geekbench’s test harness and test runtimes also prioritize accessibility and ease of use.Those differences make Geekbench 6 an interesting suite to evaluate alongside SPEC CPU2017. I looked at SPEC CPU2017 on Chips and Cheese several years ago. Now, I have a license for Geekbench 6 courtesy of Primate Labs’s founder, John Poole. It’s time to dig into the…