Totally agree. The highest benchmark number is easy to chase. We're more interested in answering a different question: "If I deploy this same VM again next week, what should I expect?" That's the whole reason we keep rerunning the same clusters over time.
Small OCI terminology note that I hadn't realized before adding OCI to the dataset: Oracle uses "OCPU" differently than the vCPU language most AWS/GCP/Azure users are used to. In OCI, 1 OCPU generally maps to 1 physical core / 2 hardware threads, so this 8 OCPU Flex VM reports as a 16 vCPU instance in the benchmark data. That makes it closer to the 16 vCPU / 64 GB class when comparing across providers.
Still an early observation window (3 runs per cluster), so we're not drawing concrete conclusions just yet. We start doing that starting at 6 runs+ with temporal spacing between clusters but these patterns are def interesting so far...
One thing we've learned doing this: When a result surprises you, the correct response is usually "run it again." Looking forward to running again in later June...