Source: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/02/07/will-opera-claim-the-javascript-speed-title/
Actual Article: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2009/02/05/meet-carakan-and-vega
Actual Article: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2009/02/05/meet-carakan-and-vega
Quote
A recent blog entry on the Opera web site states that "Carakan is currently about two and a half times faster at the SunSpider benchmark than the ECMAScript engine in Presto 2.2 (Opera 10 Alpha).
On my laptop running an Intel T5500, Opera 10 posts a total time of 5006.4ms. Even at 2.5 times faster, that's still not as fast as the 1410.2ms Chrome 2.0.160.0 puts up. In fact, the projected 2002.6ms time is 50% slower than Chrome.
That said, Sunspider is only a benchmark. What really matters is how browsers compare to each other in real use, and Opera 10 alpha certainly "feels" like it's competitive with Chrome and Firefox.
The Opera development team also reports that "other benchmarks" with which Carakan is already compatible report results that range from 5 to 50 times faster than Futhark. There's no mention of what the tests involved, but it's fair to say that if those numbers can be translated into real world performance Opera will be in a good position to throw down the gauntlet.