Still we are absolutely amazed that the difference is this large. We would have expected Nehalem to outperform Shanghai by lower margins. Although we still are a bit skeptical that the difference is this large ("too good to be true" syndrome), we do not see how you could artificially inflate a SAP benchmark. It sure is not as easy as SPECJBB or SPECfp/int.
... Hats off to the Intel engineers...
-- Dec 2008 AnandTech article on early Nehalem SAP SD benchmark publications