`sysbench cpu` basically measures whether a single primitive inside sysbench is correctly optimized for your platform which is almost meaningless. Its run-to-run variation is enormous because there is a lot riding on whether particular data structure is optimally placed and aligned, which sysbench makes no effort to control. On a typical hyperthreaded x86 machine you will get 100% variance or worse depending on whether sysbench's 2 threads are placed on the same core or on different cores, so you must control that with `taskset` if you want the result to mean anything.

On my local machine with 4 threads I get ~10k events per second on cores 0+2+4+6, but on cores 8-11 I get ~13k. Does this mean that Gracemont Atom is 30% faster than Golden Cove Core? No, it is only measuring the fact that the efficiency cores happen to share an L2 cache.