On Tuesday, Primate Labs revealed Geekbench 6, the latest version of its popular benchmark tool. Used to gauge the CPU and GPU performance of Macs, iPhones, iPads, and non-Apple computing devices, Geekbench 6’s suite of tests has updates that better reflect the workloads that today’s devices can handle.
“A lot has changed in the tech world in the past three years. Smartphone cameras take bigger and better pictures. Artificial intelligence, especially machine learning, has become ubiquitous in general and mobile applications,” wrote John Poole in a blog post. “The number of cores in computers and mobile devices continues to rise. And how we interact with our computers and mobile devices has changed dramatically – who would have guessed that video conferencing would suddenly surge in 2020?”
To better reflect modern workflows, Geekbench 6 implements new tasks, such as background blur in videoconferencing, filtering and adjusting images for social media, automatically removing unwanted objects from photos, detecting and tagging objects in photos using machine learning models, and using scripting languages to analyze, process, and convert text. Data sets have also been updated with larger files and high-resolution images.
As Geekbench explains, the new CPU benchmark scores “are used to evaluate and optimize CPU and memory performance using workloads that include data compression, image processing, machine learning, and compiling code.”
One of the biggest changes is that multi-core testing now measures how the cores engage with each other on tasks. While previous versions assigned separate tasks to each core to measure the overall speed of the chip, Geekbench 6 will test things like background blur and photo filters to test real-world performance. With nearly every benchmarkable device having multi-core chips, the new app is better suited for the CPU core configuration of performance and efficiency cores that Apple (and other) devices now implement.
A major change with Geekbench 6’s GPU Compute tests (used to gauge graphic performance) is support for Vulkan, an API used in 3D applications, including many popular games. While Vulkan is a cross-platform API, Apple pushes developers to use its own Metal API, which Geekbench continues to support.
Macworld uses Geekbench in our iPhone, iPad, and Mac review, and we’ll be using Geekbench 6. However, previous results recorded with Geekbench 5 can’t be compared to Geekbench 6, since the two use different test suites. In the short term, we may include Geekbench 5 results to provide a historical context for older devices we are unable to test with Geekbench 6. it’s hard to compare the scores without doing extensive testing, but a test of the 14-inch MacBook Pro with an 8-core CPU and 14-core GPU returned scores of 2138 (single-core) and 8475 (multi-core) versus an average of 1750 (single) and 9550 (multi) using Geekbench 5.
Geekbench 6 is free for personal use and can be downloaded from the Geekbench site (Mac) or the App Store (iOS). The Pro version allows users to run the app from a portable storage device or network drive, save results offline, and automate testing, and provides a license for commercial use. Geekbench 6 Pro is $99, but Primate Labs offers 20 percent discount ($79) until February 28.
