Chester (lamchester.delete@this.gmail.com) on November 18, 2020 7:02 am wrote:
[...]
> Sure, Cinebench isn't the best representation of average workloads. But SPEC is far
> worse. No consumer cares about SPEC. The subtests are mostly based off applications
> no one uses, or very specific scientific simulations.

I'm convinced gcc (or clang) is used by many more people than Cinebench.

Anyway Cinebench is too much about FP to be in any way an average representation of
anything beyond rendering; can you point to a study of its characteristics to disprove
that? And even for rendering I guess most people now run renderers that use GPU
acceleration.

SPEC has a good advantage for benchmark specialists: source is available for study and its
characteristics have been thoroughly studied. It's not a toy for end-users such as
Cinebench. But as any benchmark it should never be used without running other benchmarks.

> It's even useless as a benchmark
> to see whether your system is working properly, because it's so overpriced.

Cinebench is also a poor use for that as it doesn't stress enough the CPU. I prefer to use
programs such as prime95 for CPU stressing.

And as far as price goes, again it's not an end-user app or a toy.

> Also, some SPEC numbers make it seem like negative SMT scaling is common. It's not. I've
> personally never seen an application that can use all available threads do worse when
> SMT is enabled. Can we stop looking at the irrelevant pile of garbage that is SPEC?

Because you never saw that happen, it can't happen in a real world application?