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Intel's a member of BAPco, the SYSmark organization, and AMD isn't.
https://bapco.com/about/

On the other hand, if it's really a big deal to AMD, they should be able to find $100K or so to join BAPco and tilt the deck in their favor - total annual budget only seems to be $400K.
http://www.faqs.org/tax-exempt...

Whereas everything that can be seen on teh internet seems to be true, nothing about this story can be found on Apple's press page or BAPCo's website. The Apple logo is Photoshopped into the picture that BAPCo uses on their about page.

So, nice headline, but where are the facts?

The benchmark runs the following applications: Microsoft Word 2002, Microsoft Excel 2002, Microsoft PowerPoint 2002, Microsoft Outlook 2002, Netscape Communicator (Mozilla 5), McAfee VirusScan 5.13, WinZip 8.0, Macromedia Flash 5.0, and Adobe Photoshop 6.0.1 ... MobileMark also includes a conditioning run that prepares a notebook's battery for testing by draining the battery completely, then requiring that the battery be fully charged before an official test run can commence.

HP Compaq Business Notebook nx5000 (review): 6 hours, 4 minutes (15" 1024x768, 6.2lbs)

Panasonic ToughBook CF-W2 (review): 5 hours, 47 minutes (12.1" 1024x768, 2.9lbs)

HP Compaq Business Notebook nc6000 (review): 5 hours, 32 minutes (14.1" 1024x768, 5.9lbs)

Acer TravelMate 8000 (review): 5 hours, 25 minutes (15" 1400x1050, 6.8lbs)

a) Is this indicative of a high level strategy by NVidia's management, who's marketing department is pressuring them to have higher 3DMark2003 scores than ATI?

Of course it is. Fudging the drivers for a synthetic benchmark are a time honored way to make crappy hardware look good.

At present the ATI card is faster, but when you begin adding more shaders/textures the nvidia card is vastly superior and leaves ATIs card severly underpowered. Look at multitexture (textures per pass) capabilities here of each card. In hindsight, I wish Nvidia did go for the 256 bit engine, much of this argument would not currently exist.

I am a Nvidia fan but not a fanatic, FutureMark by design does favour the newer Radeon cards over the newer Nvidia cards, whether or not it is by intent, I'm in no position to say. But, if I was allowed to speculate, I'd suggest a little industrial espionage (meaning indepth knowledge of the FX card) on ATIs behalf existed long before 3dmarks release, there's certain aspects of 3dmarks release that are questionable or at least circumstantial. Which does suggest "a spy amoung us" scenario.

I do believe ATI is pawning off a substandard card and is once again lying about it (Rage Maxx).

Note:I accidently posted as AC (cookies), thus the repost.

At present the ATI card is faster, but when you begin adding more shaders/textures the nvidia card is vastly superior and leaves ATIs' card severly underpowered. Look at multitexture (textures per pass) capabilities here of each card. In hindsight, I wish Nvidia did go for the 256 bit engine, much of this argument would not currently exist.

I am a Nvidia fan but not a fanatic, FutureMark by design does favour the newer Radeon cards over the newer Nvidia cards, whether or not it is by intent, I'm in no position to say. But, if I was allowed to speculate, I'd suggest a little industrial espionage (meaning indepth knowledge of the FX card) on ATI's behalf existed long before 3dmarks release, there's certain aspects of 3dmarks release that are questionable or at least circumstantial. Which does suggest "a spy amoung us" scenario.

I do believe ATI is pawning off a substandard card and is once again lying about it (Rage Maxx).

In the issue 04/2002 of the c't magazine from last month there was a test of the Eden 1500 (VE1500). The article isn't available online but here's a short summary (hmm... took me a while to find that issue :):

The VE1500 (the test board was labelled VT6010 for any reason) is shipped with a 533 MHz processor. The passive heatsink is glued directly onto the processor, there's a second passive one on the VT8601A aka Apollo PLE133 nortbridge. FSB is 133 MHz, they got only PC133-333 RAMs working. The memory is shared with the Blade3D graphics chip of the northbridge.

Did you know that VIA violates their own spec with this board? According to the spec there shouldn't be any 3.3-Volt supply but the board uses a standard ATX connetcor. An ITX power supply is only supposed to provide 47 Watts on three outputs (5 Volt Standby, 5 and 12 Volt). There's also a "problem" with standard ATX supplies: Even under full load the board neets only 7 Watts but a standard ATX power supply sucks much more.

Additionally the VE1500 got only 59 points in the BAPCo SYSmark 2000 benchmark under Windows ME. SYSmark 2001 under Windows XP didn't even run. The rating is equal to the Sony Vaio PCG-C1VFK (Crusoe TM5600 @ 667 Mhz) or a Celeron 400.

In the issue 04/2002 of the c't magazine from last month there was a test of the Eden 1500 (VE1500). The article isn't available online but here's a short summary (hmm... took me a while to find that issue :):

The VE1500 (the test board was labelled VT6010 for any reason) is shipped with a 533 MHz processor. The passive heatsink is glued directly onto the processor, there's a second passive one on the VT8601A aka Apollo PLE133 nortbridge. FSB is 133 MHz, they got only PC133-333 RAMs working. The memory is shared with the Blade3D graphics chip of the northbridge.

Did you know that VIA violates their own spec with this board? According to the spec there shouldn't be any 3.3-Volt supply but the board uses a standard ATX connetcor. An ITX power supply is only supposed to provide 47 Watts on three outputs (5 Volt Standby, 5 and 12 Volt). There's also a "problem" with standard ATX supplies: Even under full load the board neets only 7 Watts but a standard ATX power supply sucks much more.

Additionally the VE1500 got only 59 points in the BAPCo SYSmark 2000 benchmark under Windows ME. SYSmark 2001 under Windows XP didn't even run. The rating is equal to the Sony Vaio PCG-C1VFK (Crusoe TM5600 @ 667 Mhz) or a Celeron 400.