Wondering how your current Linux system will handle AI and ML-related workloads? Well, now you can find out.
Primate Labs, makers of the hugely popular Geekbench software, has released a new preview build of their AI benchmarking tool, Geekbench ML.
And it now supports Linux.
Geekbench ML launched on Android and iOS a few years back but now that PC hardware makers like Intel and AMD are putting neural processing capabilities into their latest chips, enabling ML-accelerated workflows on desktop and laptops, they’re branching out.
So the latest Geekbench ML 0.6 preview introduces support for Linux, Windows, and macOS. While the latter 2 systems get GUI desktop apps, we Linux users have to make do with a command-line tool. Not a major drawback; it’s the stats that matter, not the window dressing.
The tool comes with machine learning workloads that model real-world AI use-cases to let you find how well your CPU, GPU, and NPU (if present) can handle ‘cutting-edge’ computing.
These workloads have been expanded to include Depth Estimation (simulating portrait lens blurring features found in fancy photo editors), Style Transfer (copies the look of one image to another), and Image Super-Resolution (which upscales images by x4).
And since all models and data sets within the app are the same ones across all supported platforms, whatever Geekbench ML score you get on Linux can be reliably compared to the same tool’s scores from other platforms.
Downloading Geekbench ML
Of course, Geekbench ML 0.6 is a preview release so you should expect quirks, inconsistencies, and bugs. Primate Labs plan to release a stable 1.0 release sometime next year.
You can download Geekbench ML from App Store for iOS, the Google Play Store for Android, and head to the Geekbench website download page to get Linux, macOS, and Windows builds.
The Linux version works on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and above on Intel and AMD systems with 2GB RAM or greater. If your machine is modest, don’t expect expedient results!
