*Source: DailyTech (
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=7927)*
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In this day and age we don't even need silicon to benchmark our processors -- some of us anyway
Last April, benchmarks of AMD’s Barcelona running at 2.6 GHz made rounds across Internet tech sites. These benchmarks, according to AMD, provided a 21% performance gain over quad-core Xeon 5355 in SPECint_rate2006 and a 50% gain in performance over Xeon 5355 in SPECfp_rate2006.
This looks pretty phenomenal until you read the footnote courtesy of AMD: "Estimated performance @ 2.6GHz based on internal AMD simulations."
Much to my surprise, these benchmarks surfaced again over the last few days. This time, however, the author did not tell you the benchmarks were simulated and at least four months old. He did not tell you that the benchmarks ran were presented to him on a PowerPoint document, and he did not tell you the numbers featured in his "review" were of a 2.6 GHz simulated chip instead of a 2.3 GHz simulated chip.
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