[HN Gopher] Does Apple's M5 Max Really "Destroy" a 96-Core Threa...
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Does Apple's M5 Max Really "Destroy" a 96-Core Threadripper?
Author : dkechag
Score : 40 points
Date : 2026-03-07 22:08 UTC (51 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (slashdot.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (slashdot.org)
| thot_experiment wrote:
| "When you measure, include the measurer" - MC Hammer
| Finnucane wrote:
| When you are MC Hammer, everything is an MC nail.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| Wow, there's a site with a worse benchmark methodology than
| Phoronix? Noted.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Phoronix is _terrible_ in terms of clickbait and deliberate
| ragebait, and its comment section is a toxic cesspool, but its
| benchmarks generally seem sound. What issues have you observed
| with their benchmark suite?
| wtallis wrote:
| Given the username of the account you're replying to, and the
| implausibility of a Phoronix reader being unaware of Tom's
| Hardware, I think you may have been baited by a troll.
| SOTGO wrote:
| Anyone who treats Geekbench as a meaningful benchmark (i.e. not
| without a huge disclaimer or with other more meaningful
| datapoints) is not to be trusted. You can only really trust it
| for inter-generational comparisons within a single architecture.
| skavi wrote:
| Since Geekbench 5, the single threaded benchmark scores have
| aligned pretty well with those from the industry standard SPEC
| benchmark.
| Aurornis wrote:
| GeekBench probably made the right choice to optimize for more
| realistic real-world workloads than for the more specific
| workloads that benefit from really high core counts. GeekBench is
| supposed to be a proxy for common use case performance.
|
| High core count CPUs are only useful for specific workloads and
| should not be purchased as general purpose fast CPUs. Unless
| you're doing specific tasks that scale by core count, a CPU with
| fewer cores and higher single threaded throughput would be faster
| for normal use cases.
|
| The callout against the poor journalism at Tom's Hardware isn't
| something new. They have a couple staff members posting clickbait
| all the time. Some times the links don't even work or they have
| completely wrong claims. This is par for the site now.
|
| To be fair, the Tom's Hardware article did call out these points
| and the limitations in the article, so this SlashDot critique is
| basically repeating the content of the Tom's Hardware article but
| more critically https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/cpus/apples-18-co...
| refulgentis wrote:
| I think this actually concedes the main criticism.
|
| If Geekbench 6 multicore is primarily a proxy for "common use
| case performance" rather than for workloads that actually use
| lots of cores, then it shouldn't be treated as a general
| multicore CPU benchmark, and it definitely shouldn't be the
| basis for sweeping 18-core vs 96-core conclusions.
|
| That may be a perfectly valid design choice. But then the
| honest takeaway is: GB6 multicore measures a particular class
| of lightly/moderately threaded shared-task workloads, not broad
| multicore capability.
|
| The criticism isn't "every workload should scale linearly to 96
| cores." It's that a benchmark labeled "multicore" is being used
| as if it were a general multicore proxy when some of its
| workloads stop scaling very early, including ones that sound
| naturally parallelizable.
| wtallis wrote:
| Geekbench 6 isn't really marketed as a one-size-fits-all
| benchmark. It's specifically aimed at consumer hardware. The
| first paragraph on geekbench.com reads:
|
| > Geekbench 6 is a cross-platform benchmark that measures
| your system's performance with the press of a button. How
| will your mobile device or desktop computer perform when push
| comes to crunch? How will it compare to the newest devices on
| the market? Find out today with Geekbench 6.
|
| And further down,
|
| > Includes updated CPU workloads and new Compute workloads
| that model real-world tasks and applications. Geekbench is a
| benchmark that reflects what actual users face on their
| mobile devices and personal computers.
| wtallis wrote:
| You're seriously posting to HN a link to your Slashdot post
| linking to your year-old blog post complaining about Geekbench
| 6's multi-threaded test without ever mentioning Amdahl's Law?
|
| Pretending that everything a CPU does is an embarrassingly
| parallel problem is heinous benchmarking malpractice. Yes,
| Geekbench 6 has its flaws, and limitations. All benchmarks do.
| Geekbench 6 has valid uses, and its limitations are defensible in
| the context of using it to measure what it is intended to
| measure. The scalability limitations it illustrates _are real
| problems_ that affect real workloads and use cases. Calling it
| "broken" because it doesn't produce the kind of scores a
| marketing department would want to see from a 96-core CPU
| reflects more poorly on you than it does on Geekbench 6.
| refulgentis wrote:
| Amdahl's Law is descriptive, not exculpatory.
|
| It explains why a workload with a large serial/contended
| fraction won't scale.
|
| It does not prove that the workload's serial fraction is
| representative of the category it claims to stand in for.
|
| So when a benchmark's "text processing" test over ~190 files
| barely gets past ~1.3x on 8 cores, that's not some profound
| demonstration that CPUs can't parallelize text work. It's
| mostly a demonstration that this benchmark's implementation has
| a very large serial bottleneck.
|
| That would be fine if people treated GB6 multicore as a narrow
| benchmark of specific shared-task client workloads. The problem
| is that it is labelled as a general multicore CPU metric, and
| is used as such, including for 18-core vs 96-core comparisons.
| That's the misuse being criticized.
|
| TL;DR: Amdahl's Law explains the ceiling; it does not justify
| treating an avoidably low ceiling as a general measure of
| multicore CPU capability.
|
| EDIT: Also, submitter, not sure who shit in parent's cereal
| this morning. Thanks for sharing, I've been wondering for
| _years_ why GeekBench was obviously broken on multicore. (comes
| up a lot in Apple discussions, as you know)
| grg0 wrote:
| The real meat from the article: https://dev.to/dkechag/how-
| geekbench-6-multicore-is-broken-b...
|
| First plot really says it all.
| wtallis wrote:
| Compare to
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/AmdahlsL...
| wmf wrote:
| The article is probably right about text processing though.
| It sounds like they took an inherently parallel task with no
| communication and (accidentally?) crippled it.
| ddtaylor wrote:
| The strategy is to make outlandish claims and then have people
| "engaging" to "disprove" all of the claims. This strategy works
| as long as people are too apathetic and/or stupid to hold liars
| accountable. It works currently because journalism has
| significantly less value than tabloid drama to many people, some
| of which are just narrative shopping for a fun curated list of
| ideas (not facts) that fit their personalized echo chamber.
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