More than 2,600 benchmark results are effectively invalidated because Intel was cheating by inflating the score of a specific benchmark by up to 9%

SPEC, a non-profit organization established to conduct fair benchmarks and one of the performance test standards organizations, has stated that ``Intel may improve the scores of certain benchmarks in order to inflate the benchmark results of its own processors.'' It effectively invalidated more than 2,600 benchmark results for Intel processors, saying that the optimization had inflated scores by up to 9%.

Targeted Intel oneAPI DPC++ Compiler Optimization Rules Out 2k+ SPEC CPU Submissions - Phoronix

Impact of Intel Compiler Optimizations on SPEC CPU2017 Example

SPEC pointed out that Intel used prior knowledge of SPEC's benchmark test code and dataset to perform narrow compilations that specifically improved performance in 523.xalancbmk_r and 623.xalancbmk_s. .

As a result, the speed of integer operations could have been improved by up to 9%, and the throughput of integer operations could have been improved by up to 4%.

The news site Phoronix reports that versions 2022.0 to 2023.0 of the ``Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler'' may be affected by this fraud.

SPEC effectively invalidated more than 2,600 relevant benchmark results by noting that they had been fraudulently inflated.

The benchmark is for Intel Xeon CPUs used in server applications, etc., and based on the compiler version, it seems that most of the 4th generation Intel Xeon processors ``Sapphire Rapids'' are affected.