Comment by wtallis
5 days ago
> 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).
It has nothing to do with whether it's an expert benchmark or not, even the dumpster fire that is UserBenchmark manages to show the three categories separately. It's just a bad practice among any kind of benchmark, basic or not. After all, the Geekbench is already doing the work needed during the tests.
Geekbench is not just intended to be used to benchmark consumer systems, it is intended to be used by consumers to benchmark their systems and to have its scores interpreted by consumers. For that audience, the most important thing that a multi-core score needs to do is counteract the naive assumption that a 20-core CPU will be twice as fast as a 10-core CPU. Having one of the top-line scores be a perfectly-scaling multi-core score that you know will be widely misinterpreted by your audience and used by vendors to mislead consumers would be serious benchmarking malpractice.
You start by saying it's used by the users and then end by saying it'd be abused by the vendors. You can't play both sides as reasons at the same time.
Besides, UserBenchmark is clearly intended to be used by users as well. It's right in the name. There has not been confusion with it, if anything labeling the scores as what they are instead of hiding it under how you want a user to see it is both clearer and avoiding benchmark malpractice - not the other way around.