Geekbench 6 arrives with new tests, adapted for modern-day devices

Primal Labs announced a new version of its popular benchmark today - Geekbench 6. The company says phones and computers are getting faster so previous methods of measuring improvements are quickly getting out of date.

Changes include bigger photos, a larger library of images for importing tests, bigger and more modern PDF examples. The app is now heavier across all platforms since it comes with several new tests, including for background blur during video calls, photo filters in social media and object detection for AI workloads.

The new Geekbench 6 seriously reduces focus on single-core CPU tests. Primal Labs says the number for the main core is no longer so important as real-world use cases extract power from different parts of hardware. Machine learning is also on the rise, meaning the multi-core CPU result is also revamped.

The final result is not just adding the performance of four different cores. The tests measure how cores “actually share workloads in true-to-life workload examples”. The world of mobile technology mixes big and small cores for quite some time, but now desktops and laptops have caught up with the practice, rendering the older Geekbench unreliable.

Geekbench 6 • Geekbench 5

The app also has better GPU calculations with new frameworks and abstraction layers. There will be a more accurate cross-platform comparison as Primal Labs integrated more ML acceleration instructions and uniform GPU performance across platforms.

The Geekbench 6 app will be available for Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows. It will remain free of charge for non-commercial use and is coming soon on Google Play.