Jared, CPU can be a misleading measurement as it accounts for the CPU time of the Octave code, but not the execution time as Octave can be waiting on IO from other processes (i.e. PLECS).
Wall clock (tic/toc) is a better solution for benchmarking compared to cputime(). Another alternative is to use the Octave profiler.
plecs('clc')
tic
t1 = cputime();
profile on;
plecs('simulate')
profile off;
t_wall = toc
t_cpu = cputime()-t1
profshow (10);
profile clear;