anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on June 30, 2013 2:53 am wrote:
> It is important to win benchmarks that are vaguely relevant. [...] How important is it to win irrelevant benchmarks.

Some times users base their decision on wich product to buy by looking at benchmarks, sometimes those benchmarks aren't really relevant to their uses.

> What do you mean, easier/cheaper? If it "improves" the chip for things
> that don't matter, then it is not actually an improvement, is it?

I don't think "doesn't matter" is the right expression, let's say that, doubling a particular metric will improve end user performance by 1%, that particular metric isn't very important, right? Let's also say that, to double that particular metric costs you 1% of the cost of the chip, worth? Likely, game-changer? No.

> You could easily and cheaply "improve" a chip for an artificial test simply by adding a
> vast amount of slow L4 cache to it, for example. Does not require any logic changes.

But costs a lot, if it were free or very cheap manufactors would already have done that.

> Your logic simply doesn't hold up. If they just wanted to get flops, the CPU would look like a GPU.

That would costs a lot as well.