Never really liked Geekbench. Synthetic benchmarks are easy to use and easy to understand but borderline useless. 1000 is better than 990 but it literally doesn't mean anything at all. Just an example: the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable. And no one should get a 2017 Intel Xeon because it's scoring higher yet that's the whole point of Geekbench, higher score is better.

Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.

Some good benchmark options here https://hwbot.org/benchmarks

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/List_of_games_with_built-i...

  Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.

Geekbench is extremely good at showing general CPU performance, especially ST. Also high correlated with SPEC at nearly 1:1 in terms of scores as shown by Nuvia before they were purchased by Qualcomm.[0]

[0]https://medium.com/silicon-reimagined/performance-delivered-...

> the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable

Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?

> Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.

Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these

Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.

Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.

Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?

You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.

AV1, Opus, Whisper, Jolt Physics... did you read the article? Are these not real?

What you want exists, it's called SPECint/SPECfp.

a 2017 Xeon can absolutely smoke an M1.. (double the FP64 units, AVX-512; huge per core caches, boatloads of I/O lanes and RAM...)

.. but it chugs power like it's not even funny.

I do like synthetic benchmarks as one input signal when evaluating a CPU; otherwise we go back to stupid numbers like frequency... which also never made sense because they had 1.8GHz AMD Athlon CPUs outperforming 2.4GHz Pentium 4's in 2002-3...

Doing a lot of real-world application testing is good, but there's always some you miss, and the worst part about it is that people start to lose patience when assessing.. How is a cinebench comparing to doing gamedev in UE5?

How is doing gamedev in UE5 comparing to doing gamedev in Snowdrop?

How does doing gamedev in Snowdrop compare to doing virtualisation (different CPUs handling that particular task better than others).

there's so many dimensions that it will always be true that there's not enough testing.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have rigorous testing like you say, in fact, what I'm actually saying is that "single number→would you like to go deeper" is a better pipeline than an excel spreadsheet that goes on for 10 pages (which still skips a bunch of nuance) and still better than one that goes on for 500 pages with a broad spectrum of topics.

The reason I'm so bitter about this is because outlets like LTT and Gamers Nexus seem to choose their games randomly (based on popularity I guess?) and so all the titles I worked on kinda got smeared by my "company"- but our games used hugely different game engines that work differently (Dunia vs Snowdrop handle CPUs... VERY differently. Snowdrop is built for multi-core. Anvil works best on a single core, and Dunia has trouble going passed 4 cores- so on large systems with multiple NUMA zones the performance is.. worse.

So the "battery of tests" always gave us a shitty score and reviewers just moved on believing themselves to be comprehensive arbiters of truth regarding performance and giving verdicts regarding the performance of games as a broad topic (which people take and don’t dig deeper themselves) and without regard to the utility of what they’re saying (500+ fps on CSGO isn't even renderable for example).

People might have been better served by looking broadly at how powerful the CPUs actually are and then digging in for their use case once they whittle a few down, because then also: developers will actually make software that tries to use the features on offer instead of assuming people will just buy CPUs that work better on their workloads.

It's a kind of "to big to fail" mentality where incumbents start being able to direct CPU sales based on those CPUs being optimised for their workloads. It's self-reinforcing.