informal, I agree povray is a bit of a toy benchmark, but CineBench?
I thought Cinebench was from one of the most popular rendering programmes?
If so I wouldn't call it minor. Optimising for SSE isnt just optimising for intel either, the Opterons do run certains subsets of of SSE faster than their intel equivalents(or they definitely did vs P4 even though intel came up with them, not sure about Conroe etc)AFAIK.