Geekbench has become the most popular and often quoted benchmark on these forums. People use it for various arguments. Intel has been concentrating a lot on the performance of the mobile CPUs and has, arguably, been ignoring the desktop performance. We see this trend in Geekbench, with Mobile CPUs in the Macbook Pros snapping at the heels of the top of the range iMac and the iMac snapping at the heels of the Mac Pros. However, as I have always said, Geekbench is a sprint and shows mainly how fast the CPU is with maximum Intel Turbo Boost. It does not show how well the system will perform in real use.
The problem is that pmset -g thermlog clearly shows that when we run Geekbench, we receive no events, therefore the CPU is running at 100% during this time with no speed limit. Geekbench’s workload is simply not strenuous enough to see the impact of thermal throttling and makes comparisons skewed towards CPUs with the maximum Turbo Boost clock rate. Basing purchasing decisions on this is not a good idea in my opinion.
The second, less important point, is that I am pretty sure that at least some people are trying to compare 32 bit and 64 bit GB scores.
The problem is that pmset -g thermlog clearly shows that when we run Geekbench, we receive no events, therefore the CPU is running at 100% during this time with no speed limit. Geekbench’s workload is simply not strenuous enough to see the impact of thermal throttling and makes comparisons skewed towards CPUs with the maximum Turbo Boost clock rate. Basing purchasing decisions on this is not a good idea in my opinion.
The second, less important point, is that I am pretty sure that at least some people are trying to compare 32 bit and 64 bit GB scores.
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