Sun Microsystems revealed Thursday that it had, in fact, modified its compilers to perform better in the CaffeineMark Java benchmark test, but that had an "obligation" to do so.
"Our job is to provide the best performance on the benchmarks that are available and we did that," said Brian Croll, director of product marketing for Solaris at Sun.
Translation: they cheated, and they did it on purpose.
As reported yesterday in WinInfo, Pendragon Software Corporation, makers of the CaffeineMark benchmark, accused Sun of purposefully building their Java compilers so that they performed abnormally well on the benchmark.
"We have no reason to believe this was a master plan from Sun management, but the compiler was tweaked to look for our benchmark and that doesn't happen accidentally," said Pendragon president Ivan Phillips.
Phillips also verified that the fastest Java performance is on Windows NT running on a Pentium II 300, not Sun Solaris. Sun had fudged the results to make Solaris come out ahead of NT, he said