Primate Research Institute
Ars reviews a lot of hardware, and part of that review process includes running benchmark apps. The exact app we use may change over time based on what you’re trying to measure, but the purpose is the same. That means comparing the relative performance of two or more things to make sure the product works the same in real life. They do it on paper.
One app that has been consistently used as part of our test suite for over a decade is Geekbench, a CPU and GPU computing benchmark releasing its sixth major version today. One reason is that it’s small, free, and easy to run. One reason is that developer Primate Labs maintains a huge searchable database spanning millions of test runs on millions of devices. Geekbench has become one of the most used (and most discussed) benchmarking tools on the internet, partly because it works with just about anything under the sun.
Primate Labs founder and Geekbench creator John Poole told Ars about the popularity of Geekbench: “I know that PCWorld’s Gordon Un basically calls Geekbench the official benchmark for Twitter discussions.
Cross-platform from the start
Geekbench’s cross-platform compatibility is part of its appeal, and has been built into the benchmark since early versions. It started in the heyday of the PowerPC Mac era, when Apple hardware was quirky and niche, and apps running Mac OS X were relatively rare.
“I only switched to Macs around 2002,” Poole told Ars. “So I was used to that ecosystem. [Power Mac] The G5 came out and I thought, oh man, this is really cool. I went out and bought his one of his new G5’s and it felt slower than my previous Mac. And I thought this was really weird. what happened. …so you know what I grabbed [benchmarks] I was able to download and run them, but what the benchmarks were saying didn’t match my experience, so I was really confused.
“So I went and reverse-engineered one of the popular benchmarks and found that the test was so bad I can’t find the right words,” Poole said. “They weren’t testing anything substantive. They were doing very simple arithmetic operations on really small amounts of data, but they weren’t really testing anything. So how hard is it to create a benchmark? Own.”
The original Geekbench (called “Geekbench 2006” and apparently lost in time) supported Windows and macOS at launch. Geekbench 2, released in 2007, added support for Linux. An official iPhone version was released in 2010 and an Android version in 2012. Since Geekbench 3 was released in his mid-2013, he has released a revision with new focus areas and reorganized tests about once every three years.
And Geekbench can run on more than just mainstream commodity hardware and software. Geekbench works with the PlayStation 3’s Cell processor (“[not] At the time, Poole wrote something very impressive for a general-purpose CPU. Long story short, he even had a version that worked natively on BlackBerry 10. , his fully open-source MNT Reform laptop, the first wave of Android Wear smartwatches, plus hundreds of desktops, laptops, phones and tablets.
