Overview
- Geekbench published a technical analysis showing Intel’s Binary Optimization Tool rewrites parts of program binaries after linking to fit Intel architectures.
- In the HDR workload, instruction tracing showed 14% fewer total instructions with iBOT, driven by a 62% drop in scalar ops and a 1,366% surge in vector instructions.
- The team found iBOT checks a binary’s checksum to target specific builds, and it adds a noticeable startup pause that was about 40 seconds on the first Geekbench 6.3 run and about two seconds thereafter.
- Scores rose in Geekbench 6.3 by roughly 5.5% overall, with some workloads such as Object Remover and HDR gaining up to about 30%, while Geekbench 6.7 showed little to no change.
- Geekbench will keep flagging iBOT-optimized results and is adding telemetry in version 6.7 to label runs, with older Windows results from 6.6 and earlier remaining flagged.