"They don't even pretend to back this up with any benchmaks."
Did you not read the Anandtech article?
"The new performance rating system is independent of any previous rating system and based solely on relative performance among other Sempron processors in a suite of benchmark suites. Specifically, AMD uses:
PC Magazine Business Winstone 2004 PC Magazine Content Creatoin Winstone 2004 SYSmark 2004 Office Productivity Overall SYSmark 2004 Internet Content Creation Overall"