[AstralStorm]

There's no "gauging potential". Would you suddenly go with OICC if it has extremely high IPC? How about old Core instead of new Skylake? Oh shoot, there is no potential in Core if it's not being made!

Even different Zen 2 CPUs have varied performance properties not just due to cores, but due to CCX count.

The exactly one use for such microbenchmark and that's optimizing the compilers.

Even if there were multiple implementations?

Also remember that x86-64 unlike x86 is not closed, and unlike POWER, RISC-V, ARM or MIPS is not actually well defined.

If AMD suddenly adds a new but useful instruction set like they did with 3DNOW in ancient times, or accelerate something reasonably common that way, say add a special SIMD conditional, where do you even start in comparison? What if Intel actually does add a useful FPGA programmable computing capability as promised or enhanced DMA?