Primate Labs is shipping Geekbench 6 for Windows, Linux, macOS and Android. The new version is designed to focus on machine learning workflows and to address how processors with "big" and "little" cores share workloads. That means that Geekbench will "better take advantage of your GPU," as those jobs rarely just use the CPU.

Primate Labs' press release said: "New frameworks and abstraction layers for our benchmark also mean more accurate cross-platform comparisons for these measurements across device types and environments, with support for more ML acceleration instructions, as well as more uniform GPU performance across platforms," 

The tests will be able to quantify the way that cores share tasks in "true-to-life workload examples." Previously, Geekbench added together the performance of each core. It also features larger images, to simulate what you might actually take with your phone's camera.

There are a range of new tests too including: 

• Background blur, as during video conferences
• Photo filters, similar to those used by modern social media apps
• Object detection for AI workloads
• Photo library for importing and semantic tagging photos and metadata
• Text processing for parsing and converting things like markdown and regex in Python (more true to real developer use cases)

Primate also says it is updating ray tracing, horizon detection and navigation tests, while keeping around measurements of loading websites, processing HDR, importing photo files, rendering a PDF and more.

One member of the Tame Apple Press who felt the need to tell us how much Apple gear he owned warned that it would take longer to perform these tests.

"It took my personal MacBook Pro with M1 Pro just over three minutes to run the updated test," he moaned. Of course, it did not occur to him to run the benchmark on a proper computer which might return speeds faster than a souped up mobile phone.