Quote Originally Posted by i found nemo View Post
how so? pi is all about low latency & bandwidth from cache & system memory. example 1mb l2 has about 200 mhz advantage vs 512kb cache, assuming ram timings & speeds are exact( on amd ). how's it unrealistic? wasn't so bad years ago when amd was spanking intel in that app. ( unless you had a pentium m, wich was on par, if not exceeding amd in more than just pi ) you need to talk to the super pi god, aka one page book ( opb ).

super pi may seem inaccurate because all the sudden we have hardware that has implimented micro ops fusion & can do calculations in a sinch. it's called, progress. so is 3d mark '01 useless? every bench has it's place, even synthetic.
SuperPI isn't useful in the context of a general performance indicator benchmark. The reason for this is that SuperPI uses only x87 instructions to do its workload. This was a good test long ago, but the trend has been for any computationally intensive program to use optimizations--substituting vanilla x87 instructions for MMX, SSE, SSE2, 3DNow, etc instructions wherever possible. In the context of modern applications (at least for five years now), many if not most or all of the popular compilers and frameworks utilize these special instructions without the programmer even knowing about it. This includes C, C++, CLIs (like C#, J#, and VB.NET), etc. A developer basically has to explicitly decline the use of optimizations or write their code in ASM to develop an application that will stress the same pipeline as SuperPI. Because of this, testing only x87 instructions isn't going to be a good indicator of general processor performance. Relatively few (if any) applications a user is likely to actually run will be using the same pipeline so heavily. Since performance of a processor is different when using SSE, MMX, etc and x87 instructions, a valid transposition between the results we see is impossible. However, if you just want to see how fast a handful of x87 instructions are between processors, by all means use SuperPI. It would be a valid indicator of that. That's just not the context we user SuperPI in, which is why it isn't a good choice or indicator.

For similar reasons, this is why 3DMark06 isn't a good benchmark to run anymore. 3DMark06 is more processor intensive than most modern games. The ratio between CPU and GPU power yielding increased framerates in these modern games is much different. You could call 3DM06 CPU-colored, as its score will increase unrealistically with increased CPU power. You will not experience quite so drastic of framerate increases in real (modern) games as it would seem to indicate.