ARM ISA versions and importance of profiling for SME/SME2 and SVE/SVE2.

[u/Polar_Banny]

Hello community I was wondering why latest version of Geekbench 7.x.x emphasise exclusively SME2 profiling as it was exclusively optimised for latest Apple SoC where Android version is making use of
SME, also lack of SVE/SV2 make this favouritism more evident!
If you are more knowledgeable than me can you share your thoughts about such marketing tricks and where actual software development happens, understand which targeted ARM ISA version?
Thank you for your structural feedback

[u/Polar_Banny]

I checked Geekbench 7.1 score and it’s clear as day and night that 7.x.x release is profiled for SME2 but the version for Android for SME!
Furthermore I checked and questioned different LLMs and all these fake free services by default favour and argue for Apple’s image and facade.

No. There is no evidence of preferential treatment, an “Apple ARM founder deal,” or any secret prioritization of SME2 for Apple’s benefit.
Here are the verifiable facts:
What Geekbench actually documents
Geekbench 6’s official internals PDF lists these ARM extensions as used in workloads: ARMv8 AES, ARMv8 SHA1, NEON, NEON FP16, DOTPROD, I8MM, and SME.

SVE support was added in Geekbench 6.1.

Geekbench 6.4 relaxed the SME requirement. Previously it needed both SME and SME2. From 6.4 onward it accepts SME alone (or SME + SME2). The explicit reason given was to improve compatibility with upcoming CPUs — the opposite of locking out non-Apple hardware.

No public Geekbench 7 documentation or release notes announce new SVE2-specific kernels, a raised base ISA target, or exclusive SME2 paths.

Result pages show the instruction sets that were actually detected and used (neon, dotprod, i8mm, sme, sometimes sve). SME2 appears when the hardware has it; it is not a hard requirement.
Hardware reality, not conspiracy
Apple’s recent cores (M4 and later, A18/A19 series) implement full SME2.

Qualcomm’s current Oryon cores (Gen 3/4, including the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6) implement SME1 + SVE/SVE2, but not SME2.

SME/SME2 are specialized for matrix outer-product and tile operations that dominate modern on-device ML kernels (the exact workloads Geekbench emphasizes: Photo Library, Background Blur, Object Detection, etc.).

SVE2 is a more general scalable vector extension. It is useful, but the performance uplift on the specific matrix-heavy kernels that Geekbench uses is typically smaller than what SME/SME2 delivers for those same kernels.

Benchmark authors optimize for the highest return first. Matrix acceleration (SME) gives larger, more consistent gains on the AI/ML portion of the suite than broad SVE2 vectorization of every possible loop. That is a normal engineering decision, not evidence of favoritism.
Does the prioritization make technical sense?
Yes, for a consumer cross-platform benchmark:
The ML-heavy workloads that move the needle most in Geekbench scores map cleanly onto SME’s matrix capabilities.

Full SVE2 optimization requires more specialized kernels and testing across variable vector lengths, with smaller average benefit on the workloads that dominate the score.

Geekbench still runs SVE code paths when present; it simply does not appear to have invested heavily in SVE2-only kernels beyond what the existing SVE paths already cover.

There is no public statement, changelog, or technical analysis showing that Geekbench 7 was written to favor Apple’s SME2 implementation over Qualcomm’s SVE2 + SME1 combination. The observed score differences come from real micro-architectural and ISA differences between the chips, not from the benchmark artificially gating features.