First and foremost, c't itself admitted that the G4 should have mopped the floor with "the x86 FPU with its antiquated stack structure and eight registers only"-- so why, when the G4 was shown to be half as fast as the Pentium III, did the magazine just say "gee, we guess the G4's no supercomputer" and then saunter away, hands in pockets, whistling a jolly tune? Doesn't anyone think it's strange that they failed to mention that the SPEC2000 test, as compiled, utterly ignores the G4's Velocity Engine registers, which are what gives that chip its supercomputer-class, greater-than-gigaflop floating point performance? What c't did is tantamount to forcing you to write with your toes and then telling you that your handwriting sucks.

What's more, while the industry just loves SPEC benchmarks, faithful viewer Mark Davis reminds us that they've always been biased towards Intel processors, in part because the SPEC code just floods the chip with a constant stream of perfect instructions and let it work at peak efficiency, which is nothing like how real software is processed. As you may recall from Jon Rubinstein's "Megahertz Myth" spiel, Intel's recent chips take a speed hit from the recurring need to clear and refill those extra-long pipelines due to incorrect predictive branching-- it's that whole "pipeline tax" thing. With the SPEC test, there are no data dependency bubbles, and therefore no pipeline tax, so Intel's chips perform better than they would in actual battle conditions.