[mpixel]

I agree with all your points and also agree that honestly, these scenarios aren't far off from real world tasks.

I get the main issue, which is you could adjust the workload by 10% and achieve a 50% performance loss when you do this at the point where we cross the cache threshold and whatnot.

However I see CPUs unique in that I rank them _for_ these scenarios. A particular might be ranked unfairly, but as long as the test is equal, the better one is infact better, just not by the 50% the test might show but it's still going to be 5% better. I expect my GPU to be idle when it isn't training AI or rendering frames, but for the CPU, it's general purpose in real life, and anything goes.

[xxs]

>just not by the 50% the test might show but it's still going to be 5% better.

Sort of, indeed. Yet, when you see any promotional/marketing material - you see all those phallic bar graphs, and how much bigger it is. Other than that - heavy cache utilization hides inferior memory subsystem (latency/throughput), the latter tends to be quite important in the real world. Overall benchmarks/tests that feature handful of MB as datasets, and run in 100s of ms - should not be used as representative... for most use cases.

That was my initial point - 'don't trust'.