SPEC has effectively invalidated more than two thousand SPEC CPU 2017 benchmark submissions after it was discovered the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler was effectively "cheating" per their standards with a targeted optimization.

Multiple folks have written in today about a number of SPEC CPU submissions now carrying this compiler notice:

"SPEC has ruled that the compiler used for this result was performing a compilation that specifically improves the performance of the 523.xalancbmk_r / 623.xalancbmk_s benchmarks using a priori knowledge of the SPEC code and dataset to perform a transformation that has narrow applicability.

In order to encourage optimizations that have wide applicability (see rule 1.4 https://www.spec.org/cpu2017/Docs/runrules.html#rule_1.4), SPEC will no longer publish results using this optimization.

This result is left in the SPEC results database for historical reference."

There are 2000~2500 submissions that appear impacted by this optimization with the Intel oneAPI DPC++ compiler.

What I've heard is that Intel oneAPI 2022.0 through 2023.0 are affected by this outlawed compiler optimization. So the very latest post-2023.0 are okay according to the SPEC rules as well as the pre-2022 data. In the benchmark test targeted by this compiler optimization it could increase the result by more than 50%. In the grand scheme of things for the overall SPECint scoring could be impacted by several percentage points.