We have another benchmark to start wars over. This one is done by a university (Uni of South California), so it MUST be un-biased ;)
The paper is more than just a benchmark though, it has sections:
Benchmarks
Five composite benchmarks listed below show that modern Java has acceptable performance, being nearly equal to (and in many cases faster than) C/C++ across a number of benchmarks.
In Theory: Maybe Java Should be Faster
This section discusses the theory behind how Java CAN be faster than C++ (many people seem to think that because C++ is compiled it must be faster)
Why is “Java is Slow” so Popular?
Java is now nearly equal to (or faster than) C++ on low-level and numeric benchmarks. This should not be surprising: Java is a compiled language (albeit JIT compiled).
Nevertheless, the idea that “java is slow” is widely believed. Why this is so is perhaps the most interesting aspect of this article.
An interesting read.