Enlarge (credit: Primate Labs)

We review a lot of hardware at Ars, and part of that review process involves running benchmark apps. The exact apps we use may change over time and based on what we're trying to measure, but the purpose is the same: to compare the relative performance of two or more things and to make sure that products perform as well in real life as they do on paper.

One app that has been a consistent part of our test suite for over a decade is Geekbench , a CPU and GPU compute benchmark that is releasing its sixth major version today. Partly because it's small, free, and easy to run; partly because developer Primate Labs maintains a gigantic searchable database spanning millions of test runs across millions of devices; and partly because it will run on just about anything under the sun, Geekbench has become one of the Internet's most-used (and most-argued-about) benchmarking tools.

"I'm really glad that people seem to have latched onto it," Primate Labs founder and Geekbench creator John Poole told Ars of Geekbench's popularity. "I know Gordon Ung at PCWorld basically calls Geekbench the official benchmark of Twitter arguments, which is the fallout from that."

Enlarge / The 2021 16-inch MacBook Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

It looks like the first benchmarks of Apple's upcoming M2 Max chip have leaked in Geekbench's database.

When users run the over-the-shelf version of the Geekbench 5 benchmarking tool, the scores are logged to a public database of results and are tied to entries for specific hardware. In this case, the result (which was discovered by a Twitter user ) is listed under a product labeled "Mac14,6" running the as-yet-unreleased operating system "macOS 13.2 (Build 22D21)." The entry also noted that the chip had 12 cores.

The chip in question is likely destined for MacBook Pro and Mac Studio models that will launch sometime next year. As for the results: The overall single-core score is 1,853, and the multicore score is 13,855. The more granular scores like crypto, integer, and floating point generally track along the same lines when compared to this chip's predecessor, the M1 Max.

I have a Windows 10 SSD drive (for two games that would run some 3rd party add-ons under Linux) and a Manjaro Linux SSD drive for booting Linux (all Linux user data sits on a slower HDD). The Windows 10 side is not use for daily use so is a lot cleaner in terms of what (and how much) is installed.

That said, with the same graphics card and normal boot up with what auto starts, the Linux side shows a distinct edge.

Also, for comparison is the benchmark for my Core i7 CPU. The Big difference is the AMD has double the number of cores.

#technology #geekbench #benchmarking #windows #linux