Do you remember the renaming of Quake to Quack benchmarking controversy? We do, but in case you don’t, here’s another one for the pile. Intel’s new Binary Optimization Tool, better known as iBOT, is now doing some benchmark optimization of its own, and Geekbench’s response is worth paying attention to.
Primate Labs, the developer behind Geekbench, announced that it will display a warning on all benchmark results from CPUs that support iBOT, including Intel’s Core Ultra 200S Plus (Arrow Lake Refresh) and select Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) processors. The warning reads: “This benchmark result may be invalid due to binary modification tools that can run on this system.” The concern isn’t that Intel is skipping work or producing wrong outputs; iBOT doesn’t do that. The problem is that it modifies instruction sequences in executable code at the hardware level to optimize them for Intel’s architecture, and it does so in ways that are not publicly documented. Geekbench can’t detect when iBOT is active, which means it can’t tell whether a submitted result reflects a standard run or an optimized one.
A week after the initial warning, Primate Labs published findings from its own investigation. Using Intel’s Software Development Emulator, the team found that iBOT achieves its gains primarily by vectorizing scalar instructions. On the HDR processing subtest, for example, the tool reduced total instructions by 14% while cutting scalar instructions by 62% and increasing vector instructions by over 1,300%. The overall performance gain in Geekbench 6.3 on a system with the Core Ultra 9 386H came out to about 5.5% across single and multithreaded scores, with individual workloads seeing uplift up to 30%. Some subtests saw no benefit at all, which is part of why Geekbench considers the results non-comparable: the gains are highly workload-dependent and reflect Intel-specific code optimization rather than a general architectural advantage.
Currently, Geekbench 6.3+ is one of only a handful of non-gaming applications that Intel has validated for iBOT support, which Intel itself has described as a “proof of concept.” Supported games include a short list of titles where Intel has profiled the binaries and pushed optimized instruction sequences. The tool is disabled by default and has to be enabled manually through Intel’s Application Performance Optimization interface.
Starting with Geekbench 6.7, Geekbench will be able to detect when iBOT is enabled and will note the status of it in the benchmark results. Versions prior to Geekbench 6.7 will have the warning message on all published benchmarks for the affected chipperies.
When Intel launched its Application Performance Optimization feature with 14th Gen, the community got excited over benchmarks showing large gains, only to find the real-world improvements were largely limited to CPU-bound scenarios. Whether iBOT has a broader future depends entirely on how aggressively Intel expands its supported application list. Right now, the tech is interesting at the architectural level but too narrow to represent a chip’s real-world daily performance.