SPEC says Intel's Xeon processors were using a compiler that artificially inflated the results of its industrial benchmark by as much as 9%.

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%.

  • aluminium@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    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…

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      39·
      9 months ago

      The article states that the compilation was tailored for this specific task, which means it doesn’t represent how the CPU would normally perform it. 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.

    • Giooschi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12·
      9 months ago

      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.