Linpack is a common go-to number because, for all the flaws, it's a widely quoted number. E.g. used in the top500 ranking. It tends to let the cpu crank away and not stress the interconnect, and is widely viewed as an upper bound on perf for the machine. In the E5 case it'll be particularly helped by the move to AVX enabled cores, and take more advantage of that than general workloads. Realistic hpc workloads stress a lot more of the machine beyond the cpu. Interconnect performance in particular.
People like to dump on x86 but it's not that bad. There are plenty of features no one really uses and we still have around, but those features will often end up being microcoded and not gunking up the rest of the core. The big issue is decoder power and performance. x86 decode is complex. On the flipside, the code density is pretty good and that is important. Secondly, Intel and others, have added various improvements that help avoid the downsides. E.g. caching of decode, post-decode loop buffers and uop caches etc. Plus the new ISA extensions are much kinder..