Geekbench is getting its latest major revision, with Geekbench 6 available today for iOS, macOS, and other platforms.
Geekbench 6 is the latest major update to the benchmarking app, and the first big change since the 2019 release of Geekbench 5. What’s new?
A big focus throughout Geekbench 6 appears to be catching up with modern hardware and using tests that are more reflective of today’s workloads. With that in mind, there are a few new tests in this latest version of Geekbench. These tests include “background blur” (such as is used in video calls), “photo filters” from social media apps, “object detection” for AI, as well as new tests for tagging metadata on photos and text processing. Geekbench also points out that many existing tests have been updated to better reflect modern workloads.
This new version of Geekbench is also changing how the app performs and scores benchmarks, with tests now taking better advantage of the GPU throughout.
Many new software features and performance improvements come to us through the
contemporary magic of machine learning, and these tasks don’t just use your CPU. Geekbench
6 has been updated to better take advantage of your GPU for these workflows. New frameworks
and abstraction layers for our benchmark also mean more accurate cross-platform comparisons
for these measurements across device types and environments, with support for more ML
acceleration instructions, as well as more uniform GPU performance across platforms.
Multicore scores have been updated as well, with the new scale measuring how cores share workloads in “true to life” scenarios. This should also provide more accurate and comparable results when dealing with CPU architectures that mix “big” and “little” cores.
We’ve also overhauled how our multi-core benchmarking scores work. Rather than adding
together the performance of each core so that benchmarks scale linearly with an increased core
count, our tests measure how cores actually share workloads in true-to-life workload examples.
Meanwhile, on Android, Geekbench 6 adopts Google’s Material You design language for theming throughout the app based on a user’s wallpaper.
Another change coming with this latest version of Geekbench is to pricing. All “non-commerical” use of Geekbench is now free, while the “Pro” version is discounted by 20% to celebrate this new update. That license also now unlocks command-line automation, offline result management, and a stand-alone version.
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