It bothers me because there is no reason it can't just give 3 results: single, mixed/low thread, all core and yet there is often debate on which 2 numbers in such benchmarks instead.

But, of all of the 2-pick-only options, choosing a custom mix and calling it multi-core requires guessing your actual workload on both the content of the mixed test suite as well as the scaling profile of the CPU to reason with. On the other hand, just testing "single core" and "all core" at least only requires you to guess based on what you think the scaling profile of the CPU is.

Nothing beats just testing your actual workload, but that doesn't mean all other ways of testing have to be equally good.

> But, of all of the 2-pick-only options, choosing a custom mix and calling it multi-core requires guessing your actual workload on both the content of the mixed test suite as well as the scaling profile of the CPU to reason with.

Yes, that's pretty much the whole point of Geekbench: to offer non-experts a way to measure CPU performance and produce scores that are relevant to a specific class of devices and users and use cases, rather than artificially inflated.

Benchmarking experts can already use something like SPEC, which does offer single-thread and both types of multi-thread test modes (SPECrate and SPECspeed).