That's interesting because that's how humans actually do algebra. Who cares about the decimal expansion of some irrational if in the end we divide it by itself for example.
Pardon. I didn't mean to imply you were intentionally doing that. Just trying to make sure there's skepticism of benchmarks as well as skepticism that the boost from branch prediction is dishonest.
That's not the impression I got from that thread. They seem to agree that this is bad for benchmarking, but remain undecided on whether that's good or bad for real-world processing.
It depends on the work. So as always benchmark suites are to be taken with a grain of salt. More specific benchmarks, such as compiling a standard set of real software packages, can give a clearer picture of performance for those more specific use cases.
Until we see more specific data on how these chips perform for certain tasks, this is just FUD.