I don't know about 'way' out of date, it was first published just a few months ago (November) and the authors pushed a revised version just a few weeks ago (March 30th), but i definitely agree that it's not using the most current implementations
>> Soumith's convnet-benchmarks is much more up-to-date
I'll definitely check these out, thanks for the link
The field is moving quickly enough that many published benchmarks are stale within 3 months, and it's a lot of hard work to maintain up to date benchmarks, given how many frameworks there are. Also there are performance/memory/scalability/flexibility tradeoffs everywhere, so it's hard to capture everything in one number without a tremendous number of caveats.
My conclusion from this is that Soumith's approach to having a living repository is the way to go. It's harder to call it a "publication", but it's providing something of more lasting value than a static performance snapshot in a field where the engineering is moving so quickly.