Analyzing Geekbench 6 under Intel's BOT

https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2026/03/analyzing-geekbench-6-under-intels-bot/

14•hajile•1h ago

Comments

refulgentis•43m ago

> BOT optimizations are poorly documented, aggressive in scope, and damage comparability with other CPUs. For example, BOT allows Intel processors to run vector instructions while other processors continue to run scalar instructions. This provides an unfair advantage to Intel

Wait until they hear about branch predictors.

boomanaiden154•24m ago

Post link optimization (PLO) tools have been around for quite a while. In particular, Meta’s BOLT (fully upstream in LLVM) and Google’s Propeller (somewhat upstream in LLVM, but fully open source) have been around for 5+ years at this point.

It doesn’t seem like Intel’s BOT delivers more performance gains, and it is closed source.

trynumber9•21m ago

Question: do those vectorize code as in the example here? I was of the understanding they performed a more limited subset of optimizations.

tyushk•21m ago

Intel BOT seems to be patches for specific binaries (hence why they didn't see a difference for Geekbench 6.7), unlike BOLT/Propeller which are for arbitrary programs. The second image from their help page [1] showcases this.

[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...

userbinator•5m ago

Applying targeted binary patches shouldn't take 40 seconds... unless that's also a fake "so it looks like it's working really hard" delay.

boomanaiden154•3m ago

I might be thinking of a different project then...

I swore Intel had their own PLO tool, but I can only find https://github.com/clearlinux/distribution/issues/2996.

userbinator•22m ago

This suggests the checksum is used to identify whether the binary is known to BOT, and thus whether BOT can optimize the binary.

I do wonder what this "optimize" step actually entails; does it just replace the binary with one that Intel themselves carefully decompiled and then hand-optimised? If it's a general "decompile-analyse-optimise-recompile" (perhaps something similar to what the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmeta_Crusoe does), why restrict it?

tyushk•13m ago

quack3.exe again in a way. If it's been done for years on GPU shaders, then why not CPU code?

trynumber9•6m ago

Well in this case, there's a number of CPU which are almost exactly instruction set compatible. So if anyone can extract the binary, it might help your competitors too.

Would be neat to see what makes the Intel-optimized Geekbench incompatible with the 265K, 14900K and 9950X but work on the 270K.

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