It's a benchmark engineered to measure the performance of compilers and CPUs. It's healthy to be skeptical but in general if you get a better score, it's a real

It's a benchmark engineered to measure the performance of compilers and CPUs. It's healthy to be skeptical but in general if you get a better score, it's a real improvement. You should be able to safely exclude measurement errors and other mundane issues. These benchmarks have a slight issue that they might not represent real world performance, but compilers and CPUs tend to be optimized against them - because their timing and measurement is generally more reliable than ad-hoc real world measurement. It might lead to slight "over-optimization" which doesn't reflect real performance but at least it's reliable and repeatable.