Submitted 2 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2238972/intel-accused-of-inflating-cpu-benchmark-results.html
Intel accused of inflating CPU benchmark results::SPEC says Intel’s Xeon processors were using a compiler that artificially inflated the results of its industrial benchmark by as much as 9%.
Ah yes, the Snake oil merchants tried to sell snake oil…again
Again?
Well, it could*!
*with an industrial cooling system
Wait, people trust corporate benchmarks?
Most of humanity is pretty clueless about IT in general and are just used to trusting who they buy from with zero critical thought or research.
Again?!
If a chip has instructions to make certain tasks go faster, I’d say it’s fair to recompile the benchmark to use them. We didn’t stop adding new things after the 486.
i will only care if they ever see consequences for it.
Very mixed on this. If the compiler is for example using stuff like constexpr in C++ to do major calculations at compile time instead of at runtime then yeah its cheating.
But on the other hand if its doing some Microarchitecture specific optmizations like reordering instructions or replacing certain instructions with others - as long as these are available to the public its fair game i.m.o…
The article states that the compilation was tailored for this specific task, which means it doesn’t represent how the CPU would normally perform.
So it’s definitely cheating.
A benchmark is not supposed to be a compiler optimization competition. If they showed both, and revealed it was optimized, it would be another matter.
Even if the compiler was available to the public most software doesn’t use it, so the benchmark is still not representative of real world performance.
Are amd, nvidia and Intel not accused of this every generation?
It’s dieselgate for processors.
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Oh, I thought that was assumed, because Intel always does that. At least I noticed it very clearly already back in the 90’s.
mindlight@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What CPU did you notice that on in the 90’s and how did you notice it?
Buffalox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I remember specifically P4 was vastly overrated by Intel, where Athlon was actually generally faster at math, Intel used specially compiled code to show P4 was faster.
But there were several examples where Intel cheated, because Athlon was way better than P4.
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Everyone does it, it’s basically expected at this point that any manufacturer will announce that their new chip will run an infinite loop in fewer microseconds than the neighbouring one would.