Glossary

Geekbench

A cross-platform CPU benchmark with separate single-core and multi-core scores. The most widely-quoted CPU benchmark for desktop, laptop, and smartphone comparison.

Geekbench 6 (current version) runs a battery of CPU-heavy workloads — compression, ray tracing, ML inference, image processing — and produces single-core and multi-core scores.

Single-core vs multi-core

Single-core matters for snappy UI, web browsing, single-threaded apps.
Multi-core matters for rendering, compilation, batch image processing.

Cross-platform fairness

Geekbench 6 is reasonably comparable across iOS, macOS, Windows, Linux, Android. The same workloads are executed on each. It's not perfect — OS scheduler differences add noise — but it's the most-cited number for cross-platform CPU comparison.

What it misses

Sustained performance (Geekbench is a short burst), iGPU workloads, and ML-accelerator usage. For sustained: Cinebench R23 multi run for 10+ minutes.

Where this matters

Categories that use geekbench

Smartphones Laptops CPUs Mini PCs

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