Geekbench Platform Popularity
One of the great features of Geekbench is that it’s available for a number of different platforms and a number of different architectures. Lately I’ve been interested in how popular Geekbench is on each platform and architecture it supports, and the easiest way to do this is to look at download statistics and result browser statistics.
Download Statistics
According to Urchin Geekbench 2006 has been downloaded 18,488 times. Since Geekbench has separate downloads for each platform it supports, it’s easy to figure out how often Geekbench is downloaded for each platform.
I’ve always suspected that Geekbench is the most popular on Mac OS X (if for no other reason than Geek Patrol started out, and still is to a large degree, a Mac-oriented website). Geekbench is popular on Windows, too, but not as popular as I’d expect (or hope) given Windows market dominance compared to Mac OS X.
Geekbench popularity on Solaris and Linux PPC might seem low, but Geekbench for Solaris has only been available since October and Geekbench for Linux PPC has only been available since last week!
Result Browser Statistics
In addition to the download statistics provided by Urchin, there’s also all the results stored in Geekbench Result Browser; looking at how many results are submitted per platform is just a simple exercise in data mining.
While the result browser statistics are approximately the same (in terms of percentages, at least) as the download statistics, it is possible to differentiate between Mac OS X PPC and Mac OS X x86 with the result browser statistics (since Geekbench for Mac OS X is distributed as a Universal Binary but submits results under the architecture it runs on). It’s interesting that the number of Mac OS X PPC results are surprisingly close to the number of Mac OS X X86 results.
Final Thoughs
I’m not surprised by the relative ordering of Geekbench popularity by platform; I always suspected Geekbench was the most popular on Mac OS X, with Windows a close second. What I am surprised is the total number of times Geekbench has been downloaded; I’ve been working on Geekbench over the past two years in my spare time, and I never thought it would be this successful!
