Everything that makes the newly released Geekbench 6 different and better.
We had the opportunity to talk to John Poole, the founder of Primate Labs, which is the company behind the popular Geekbench benchmarking tool. We talked about Geekbench 6, the latest version of the software that was recently announced. Poole explained what makes it different from its predecessor and whether its scores are comparable to those of previous versions.
He also shared details on why he created Geekbench in the first place, the problems he saw in other benchmarking tools he used in the past, and much more. You can read a brief overview of the interview below or check out the whole thing in the video above.
Q: How did you come up with the idea for Geekbench, and what problem did you want to solve with it?
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A: It all started back in 2003 when I switched from a PC to a Mac with a G5 system, which was the first 64-bit computer. I ran a lot of tests on it and found that it wasn’t that much faster. I was a bit confused, so I downloaded a few popular Mac benchmarks available at the time to see if it was a problem with my system.
The benchmarks said that the G5 is faster and on par with all the other G5s out there, which seemed strange to me. So I decided to reverse engineer one of the popular benchmarks and found that the tests were very small and synthetic. They were doing very simple tasks that weren’t a good measure of overall performance. They were just focused on how fast your processor ran and didn’t take anything else into account like memory, for example.
I then decided to write my own tests and see what would happen. It was a side project of mine that I worked on for about three years. Then, in 2016, the first version of Geekbench was released as a free download.
We got a lot of great feedback from people at the time, which helped us grow into the business we are today, providing benchmarks for millions of users each month.
Q: How has the company grown since the first release of Geekbench? You’re likely not working on the software alone anymore?
A: We now have a small but mighty team here in Canada, and we mainly work remotely, especially after the pandemic. The entire team is located in Ontario, with most people being from Toronto.
We have people working in a variety of different roles, with some working on the benchmark itself, while others are more focused on the AI workloads we’re working on. Then there are people working on data science, analyzing the results to make sure we have good statistical rigor, and then there’s me — the pretty face of the company.