Geekbench 6, Benchmark Just About Anything

So Ya Wanna Be A Benchmarker?

Free things are great, free things which are actually useful more so.  Geekbench is one such thing, a free benchmarking tool that lets you test the performance of just about any device you have, from the PS3 through cellphones to your main computer.  Geekbench was created by John Poole after he was disappointed by the performance of his shiny new Power Mac G5 and even more so by the benchmarks he ran which told him it performed better than he felt it actually was.

As it turns out, he was right and thanks to this disappointment a free benchmarking tool for the masses was born.   While it was originally designed for Mac, it wasn’t long before Linux, smartphones and just about anything else could be benchmarked with Geekbench.  This long history of testing offers a nice benefit, a huge database of all the testing you and others have done, giving you the ability to compare your scores against similar mixes of hardware.

The new Geekbench 6 has changed the way it tests multi-core systems, forcing your system to share tasks between cores to better replicate how your CPU actually handles workloads and thus giving more accurate results.  It also incorporates some of what has been built in Geekbench ML to give you a way to test how your hardware would handle machine learning tasks.  You may also notice some benchmarks have been renamed to more accurately describe what is being tested, as some of the previous names were less than enlightening.

If you pop over to Ars Technica you can learn more about what the new version of Geekbench can and cannot do, as well as more on the history of the benchmark.