There isn't much point in compiling binutils as a benchmark sine most compilation will be done in a cross compiler environment. On ARM hardware SD card speed variations will likely have huge effects on compilation speed
now better benchmarks would be what sort of real world apps can it run? Think quake3 and then some in the graphics department and as far as applications it is quite capable of running full Linux distros built for the ARM processor. It has a DSP that allows 720p playback with ~10 % CPU usage (check beagleboard.org for the exact numbers) with the gstreamer DSP plugin
for a rough number of MIPS TI says it has about 2DMIPS per Mhz which translates to 1200DMIPS very roughly PII ish in speed although there are great disparities in thier designs so as I said any comparison is extremely rough again consider lots of software will have extensive optimisation to this platform take the Dreamcast emulator nullDC for instance which is looking rather promising in fact