Intel is artificially boosting CPU benchmark tests, says Geekbench
Intel’s latest processors may be impressive, but they’re not as impressive as some benchmarks suggest. A new tool from Intel alters Geekbench 6 results and gives the company’s latest processors an improved score in some tests.
Primate Labs, the company behind the popular open source CPU and GPU benchmarking software Geekbench, today published a blog post explaining that Intel’s new binary optimization tool creates false scores for Intel CPUs. The tool is designed to modify instruction sequences to improve performance, which would normally be useful, but benchmarks are only useful if they measure performance. exactly the same workload on each attempt. Otherwise, the final scores are not comparable between different devices.
When Geekbench 6 is run through the Binary Optimization tool, some workload scores increase by up to 40% and overall scores increase by up to 8%. These scores are not comparable to other devices running Geekbench and do not accurately reflect computing performance. The Intel Binary Optimization Tool only supports a few applications and only works on certain Core Ultra Series 3 (“Panther Lake”) processors and Core Ultra 200 Plus (“Arrow Lake Refresh”) chips.
The blog post explained: “The techniques used are not publicly documented and it is unclear how widely applicable these techniques are across different applications. The tool only supports a short list of applications, and Geekbench 6 is one of the few supported applications.”
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Unfortunately, this means that some Geekbench scores for these Core Ultra processors are not accurate, and Geekbench currently has “no way to detect whether a Geekbench 6 result was run with or without the binary optimization tool.” Therefore, all benchmark results from processors supporting the tool will have a message explaining that the result might be invalid. “It’s a fake!”
Hardware manufacturers finding ways to cheat on benchmarks is nothing new. This practice was particularly common on smartphones, with Samsung, HTG, Sony, LG and OnePlus all trying it at one time or another, usually by temporarily overclocking the device when a benchmarking tool was detected. Intel had been using a compiler hack for several years to artificially improve the benchmark results of its Xeon processors.
If you’re trying to compare processors and there’s at least one newer Intel processor in the mix, you’ll want to verify that the test has been completed. without Intel’s tampering. Geekbench 6.3 is the only currently supported benchmarking tool, but Intel could add more to the list.
Source: Geekbench Blog
