Not Understanding SPEC Scores?

Charles White demonstrates his (lack of?) knowledge of SPEC Scores in an editorial for DigitalVideoEditing:

Xnet's response:

Mr. Charlie White,
I feel that I should point out an error in the table calculations at the end of your article.

B/c SPEC scores are 100% dependant on the compiler used the data from Apple and AMD cannot be compared.

AMD and Intel use the ICC compiler whereas Apple used GCC for its test as it is the only cross platform compiler. Its is a UNIX compiler that is not native to the PPC.

As you might recall, Apple ran the test on Linux on the Xeon, so GCC was the best compiler to use and disabling Hyperthreading actually increased the Xeon performance per DELL
http://www.dell.com/us/en/esg/topic...3q02-khalid.htm

IBM has run some SPEC on its processors using another complier not mentioned (but I suspect it was Visual Age) and it scores the following at 1.8 GHz

Submitter: IBM

CPU: PPC 970 1.8 GHz

Compiler: Visual Age?

SPECint Base: 937

SPECfp Base: 1051

But remember we are still not using the same compiler here either, note how the compiler affects the score.

I feel that a correction should be made as the data analysis is misleading and incorrect.