The Slashdot set is up in arms that Apple might be misleading people by claiming that the new Power Mac G5 is the “world’s fastest personal computer”. Someone actually downloaded the full test results from Veritest and examined how they really came up with their numbers, and it looks like Apple might have cooked the books a bit:

Before we examine the SPEC results that Apple/Veritest claims, it must be noted that Apple/Veritest have used a few “cheats” to make the G5 look better. So whenever you see a Apple/Veritest result in the following tables, be aware that it has been affected by the following “cheats”. Apple/Veritest used a special fast malloc library on the G5 benchmark, but did not use it on the Dell/Intel benchmark, thus giving the G5 an unfair advantage…For both the Dell Dimension 8300 and the Dell Precision 650, Apple/Veritest performed the multi-processor “Rate” benchmarks with hyperthreading DISABLED. They had hyperthreading ENABLED for the single-processor benchmarks, but DISABLED for the multi-processor benchmarks, despite the fact that hyperthreading would have improved the performance of the multi-processor “Rate” benchmarks, while having little or no effect on the single-processor benchmarks. In either case, this performance-enhancing feature of the Intel processors should not have been disabled.