At least the good thing is you can run the same benchmark locally and figure out what went wrong. Anandtech posted similarly wonky results for Chromium compiles on Threadripper, but that one isn't reproducible.

I think they "explained" afterwards that they use an older version of Chromium that predates the switch to clang and spends all of it's time in the single-threaded MSVC linker. (Which immediately explains much of their results...)

> Run a lot of things, show a lot of numbers, but never worry about meaning (or correctness).

You've just described every single benchmark article that was ever published.

Yet, Phoronix stands out among their peers as their tests are actually scientific, objective and reproducible.

No, in fact many review sites delve in deeper when benchmark results don't match expectations, and those moments are usually very informative.

The result I quoted makes no real sense. It may be scientific, objective and reproducible, it's also a sign something is seriously wrong.