I don't think AMD needs to cherry pick the review "compatible" benchmarks with Zen. Sure they wanted to use those workloads Abxw listed in reviews, but they had no issues in accepting Cinebench R15 or 3DMark physics (Bullet) results internally even on Bulldozer based products. The benchmarks which are considered malicous and purely Intel optimized by some people... Not to mention that their own ACML library and GPU drivers are compiled by the same compiler, using the same optimizations as Cinebench for example :sneaky:
Comparing a same brand products with whatever Cinebench version is relevant since it will run the same code path anyway, contrary to a brand/brand comparison.
For a brand/brand comparison one should first compare the results with Cinebench R10, 11.5 and R15 and see the pattern, from what i remember here a few observations i made and wich can be checked :
- In CB R10 the Core 2 Duo got about 10% IPC advantage over the Athlon 64 X2 according to AT review.
- In CB 11.5 the difference between those two CPUs increased to 28.5%.
- With CB R15 AMD scores in respect of CB 11.5 were degraded in comparison of Intel by 10%, the FX more or less manage to be on par but both Kaveri and Excavator show miniscule IPC gain in respect of Piledriver and in comparison of CB 11.5.
At the end it s too easy to compile and recompile a soft at will as well as change the scene to grab %ages that are currently impossible to get without new instructions and serious uarches updates, we are talking of 18% and 10% penalty here while elsewhere people consider as normal single digit improvement between CPU gens, whoever is minimaly concerned by enginering level accuracy should be aware of enormities like this one.