Domain: vanshardware.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to vanshardware.com.
Comments · 56
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Re:I would have fired her.
I'm going to say that's apocryphal unless you have a citation.
There are many elevator stories but I like this one the best.
http://vanshardware.com/2010/07/the-legend-of-apples-steve-jobs/
Right, so apocryphal. This same story has been repeated differently for many other companies and CEOs in the 70s. Note the lack of names, and the general mischaracterization of Jobs' attitude. It seems cut/paste.
Got any others?
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Re:I would have fired her.
I'm going to say that's apocryphal unless you have a citation.
There are many elevator stories but I like this one the best.
http://vanshardware.com/2010/07/the-legend-of-apples-steve-jobs/
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Re:I never liked him but...
"If you don't believe that hearsay, here's 16 more examples of hearsay, which will make you more likely to accept that hearsay without evidence."
Here's another telling of the same story, only with the punchline that the guy wasn't an Apple employee, but a photocopier repair man that just happened to be in the building.
http://vanshardware.com/2010/07/the-legend-of-apples-steve-jobs/Some of the stories about Jobs are true. Some are made up. Trouble is it's hard to know which is which. Unless and until someone gives the name of the person in the lift, this one remains a dubious anecdote.
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Re:AMD a bit lost
I think you are a little lost on this one.
Once upon a time BAPCo didnt even bother pretending that they weren't actually Intel.
These days, BAPCo pretends that they arent Intel. Its still Intel tho.
BAPCo is Intel.
The last time Intel so blatantly rigged the benchmark game was when the Athlon XP's were beating the shit out of the Pentium 4's. AMD has recently made a mockery of Intels Atom solutions, and the one leaked benchmark for the Bulldozer design must have Intel more than a little worried about its future bragging rights.. so here we are, with Intel blatantly rigging the benchmark game again.
Expect a new version of ICC shortly. -
Some history
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/august/010814_Intel_SysMark/010814_Intel_SysMark.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020821_AthlonXP2600/020821_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/SYSmark%202002%20Analysis%20Presentation%20FINAL.pdf -
Some history
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/august/010814_Intel_SysMark/010814_Intel_SysMark.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020821_AthlonXP2600/020821_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/SYSmark%202002%20Analysis%20Presentation%20FINAL.pdf -
Some history
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/august/010814_Intel_SysMark/010814_Intel_SysMark.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020821_AthlonXP2600/020821_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/SYSmark%202002%20Analysis%20Presentation%20FINAL.pdf -
Some history
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2001/august/010814_Intel_SysMark/010814_Intel_SysMark.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020821_AthlonXP2600/020821_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/020822_AthlonXP2600.htm
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2002/08/020822_AthlonXP2600/SYSmark%202002%20Analysis%20Presentation%20FINAL.pdf -
ARM vs x86 review
http://vanshardware.com/2010/08/mirror-the-coming-war-arm-versus-x86/
Conclusion
The ARM Cortex-A8 achieves surprisingly competitive performance across many integer-based benchmarks while consuming power at levels far below the most energy miserly x86 CPU, the Intel Atom. In fact, the ARM Cortex-A8 matched or even beat the Intel Atom N450 across a significant number of our integer-based tests, especially when compensating for the Atom’s 25 percent clock speed advantage.
However, the ARM Cortex-A8 sample that we tested in the form of the Freescale i.MX515 lived in an ecosystem that was not competitive with the x86 rivals in this comparison. The video subsystem is very limited. Memory support is a very slow 32-bit, DDR2-200MHz.
Languishing across all of the JavaScript benchmarks, the ARM Cortex-A8 was only one-third to one-half as fast as the x86 competition. However, this might partially be a result of the very slow memory subsystem that burdened the ARM core.
More troubling is the unacceptably poor double-precision floating-point throughput of the ARM Cortex-A8. While floating-point performance isn’t important to all tasks and is certainly not as important as integer performance, it cannot be ignored if ARM wants its products to successfully migrate upwards into traditional x86-dominated market spaces.
However, new ARM-based products like the NVIDIA Tegra 2 address many of the performance deficiencies of the Freescale i.MX515. Incorporating two ARM Cortex-A9 cores (more specifically, two ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore processors), a vastly more powerful GPU and support for DDR2-667 (although still constrained to 32-bit access), the Tegra 2 will doubtlessly prove to be highly performance competitive with the Intel Atom, at least on integer-based tests. Regarding the Cortex-A8’s biggest weakness, ARM representatives told us its successor, the Cortex-A9, “has substantially improved floating-point performance.” NVIDIA’s CUDA will eventually also help boost floating-point processing speed on certain chores.
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Re:Can you imagine
That is a (probably educated) guess at the internals of the next Xbox. The CPU of the current Xbox is an 733 MHz BGA Mobile Celeron. Simple i386. If I would guess I'd say the CPU listed in the link you provided was a wish by the author. Since a PowerPC isn't i386 compatible Microsoft would have a lot of rewriting to do and a lot of risk of bugs. I would guess they'd insert an Atom or AMD's answer Conesus (or what the thing is called nowadays) and a decent GPU.
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Re:Non story
However, he has advocated sterilizing the population through "vaccines" like a super comic book villain. Or maybe just a 20th-century eugenicist.
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Re:How is this supposed to make things better?
Transmeta failed because its product sucked.
Absolutely. For those who don't know, the Crusoe uses a VLIW architecture with 128-bit words, and x86 instructions have to be decoded and RE-ORDERED in real-time into those 128-bit words. This is the same brick wall Intel ran into with optimizing compilers for the Itanium, but unlike Intel the Crusoe has to do it in REAL TIME.
Sure, the software translation layer meant that they could run Crusoe any architecture, but in the end it cost them precious performance. The chip itself wasn't much to sneeze at (two integer units and an anemic FPU), so it really didn't have the performance to spare. Then they hobbled the chip by integrating a nortbridge; this meant that ALL Crusoe-based systems would have the same video and I/O performance limitations, all in exchange for saving a buck or two on parts.
It didn't help that they hyped the successor, the Efficion, and then it didn't deliver in clock speeds or promised performance increases.
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Re:They still exist?
They had the same performance as a 1ghz pentium 4 with 3 watts power usage.
No, they didn't. Advertised power envelope for the Efficeon at 1GHz was 5w.
They also had trouble meeting that 5w spec, as Van's Hardware made painfully clear. The processor throttled down to 533 MHz under load, even though the real parts were advertised as running at 833 MHz or 1GHz without need for active cooling. The fact of the matter was, the processor used a LOT more than 5w under full load...and when cooling wasn't available to handle that heat, it throttled to maintain that 5w celing.
But this was late in the lifetime of Transmetta "the CPU manufacturer," and they were in dire need of sales. Had they been unable to hit those power numbers, they would have sold zero product. Banias LV, by that time, was seriously challenging Transmetta's hold on the low-power market, and could run circles around anything Transmetta could deliver.
Another thing to note: the Efficeon couldn't match the performance of a Pentium 4 1 GHz. No, it's more like a Pentium 4 CELERON 128k 1GHz. The Pentium 4, with 512k or 1MB L2 cache, is about %30 faster clock-for-clock than a Celeron 128k.
It was a nice idea...code morphing + VLIW processor sounded so cool, and Crusoe practially introduced the idea of low-power design to the industry. But the fact is the implementation ate cache for breakfast (and more cache means MUCH more die area and power consumption), and the performance just wasn't there even with the increased cache. Now that the low-power design concepts have been adopted by the entire x86 industry, Transmetta is no-longer important. -
Re:They still exist?
They had the same performance as a 1ghz pentium 4 with 3 watts power usage.
No, they didn't. Advertised power envelope for the Efficeon at 1GHz was 5w.
They also had trouble meeting that 5w spec, as Van's Hardware made painfully clear. The processor throttled down to 533 MHz under load, even though the real parts were advertised as running at 833 MHz or 1GHz without need for active cooling. The fact of the matter was, the processor used a LOT more than 5w under full load...and when cooling wasn't available to handle that heat, it throttled to maintain that 5w celing.
But this was late in the lifetime of Transmetta "the CPU manufacturer," and they were in dire need of sales. Had they been unable to hit those power numbers, they would have sold zero product. Banias LV, by that time, was seriously challenging Transmetta's hold on the low-power market, and could run circles around anything Transmetta could deliver.
Another thing to note: the Efficeon couldn't match the performance of a Pentium 4 1 GHz. No, it's more like a Pentium 4 CELERON 128k 1GHz. The Pentium 4, with 512k or 1MB L2 cache, is about %30 faster clock-for-clock than a Celeron 128k.
It was a nice idea...code morphing + VLIW processor sounded so cool, and Crusoe practially introduced the idea of low-power design to the industry. But the fact is the implementation ate cache for breakfast (and more cache means MUCH more die area and power consumption), and the performance just wasn't there even with the increased cache. Now that the low-power design concepts have been adopted by the entire x86 industry, Transmetta is no-longer important. -
So suprising...Next we will be told that one major benchmark, made by so-said independent organization, is in fact made by Intel...
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. ob
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. tcy
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. hh
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. lt
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. yk
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. raq
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Thermal throttle-Efficeon's slower than you think
Here's an interesting article on Van's Hardware about the Efficeon's thermal throttling properties. Apparently it's even slower than you think.
http://www.vanshardware.com/articles/2004/05/04051 7_efficeonFreeze/040517_efficeonFreeze.htm -
Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. uiw
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks [vanshardware.com] show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design. cs
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Re:No benchmark results for TM??
Van's Hardware has done some Efficeon benchmarking here.
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Transmeta throttling - 12 CPUs, gonna need it!
Check out this article regarding throttling with the new TM6800 processor:
http://www.vanshardware.com/reviews/2004/04/040405 _efficeon/040405_efficeon.htm
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Does Transmeta have a future?It's common knowledge that their older Crusoe processors had rather unimpressive performance. They had a small niche in energy-efficient computing, but even there they didn't appear much better than the ULV Tualatin mobile-P3s to me. Recently I read some claims that their new Efficeon would perform almost on P-M levels. But the first real benchmarks I found tells a complete different story. From the conclusion:
Unfortunately, the efficeon is a staggering failure by nearly every measure.
Given this, is there any hope left for the company?
Performance is unambiguously lackluster. In fact, efficeon is only slightly faster than Crusoe. If it weren't for the other Transmeta products and the 366MHz AMD Geode, thrown in for comic relief, the Crusoe would be dead last even when compared to the miniscule VIA C3. -
Re:Side by Side?
*waves hand*
these are the benchmarks that you are looking for. -
Re:Low-voltage + PowerNow == PentiumM CompetitionTake a look at the transmeta review that someone else posted in a different thread.
A really great article, the only thing I wish they'd have really tested is battery life (although admitted that would be more like testing the notebooks themselves, not the processors).
Anyway, check out the comparison of the Athlon64 3200+ vs. the Banias (Pentium-M) 1400. Even scaling up the Banias's numbers by 21% (to give a 1.7Ghz max) and scaling the Athlon64's numbers down 21% (to 2700+), it looks like the A64M totally kicks ass... and this isn't even using 64bit code!
This could spell a possible problem for Intel who has held the crown of the "sweet spot": a powerful, battery conscious mobile processor (AthlonXPs don't step down well, and lets not even talk about the P4Ms)
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Re:transmeta
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design.
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design.
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Speed is by no means
what these processors are known for. Benchmarks show that. That's not to say it's a bad processor, and maybe the Efficeon will turn out a little sweeter. Meanwhile, there isn't a whole lot about Transmeta's stuff that stands out. Except the wacky design.
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Re:Talk about journalistic integrity!Years ago, the THG site published some very negative reviews on Intel chips in combination with Rambus. These were very damaging to Intel and Rambus at the time... but the articles are no longer available on the site and the person who wrote them (Van Smith) no longer works for THG.
After he left, THG retroactively edited authorship bylines on his articles. (his take) Not good journalism practice, and it was around this time when THG became very friendly to Intel and hostile to AMD.
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Re:fr1st ps0t #2
Benchmarks:
Via C3 vs Transmeta CPU
Via C3 vs Celeon 1300 Mhz and 667 Mhz
Given that the current market C3 has a slow FPU it holds up pretty well for the amount of power it uses, the cost, and the form factor it allows. It is nowhere near as slow as a PII 300 Mhz in any of the benchmarks I glanced at. Feel free to point out some ultra-FPU bound benchmark that I missed and you're using to backup your comment.
The C3 is in no way a powerhouse but given that it can be easily used in small form factors like mITX and it is cheap ($50-$120 for motherboard and CPU) it deserves a little respect. I don't even own one but I can't wait for the next C3 that is coming out with full speed FPU and other benefits. -
Did the U.S. Set Fire to Kuwait's Oil Fields?article from vanshardware
Did the U.S. Set Fire to Kuwait's Oil Fields?
A popular radio program heard worldwide claims to have proof that the United States, working under the auspices of the United Nations, was responsible for igniting the massive oil field fires in Kuwait at the close of the first Iraqi war. The controversial talk show team of Joyce Riley and Dave VonKleist host the Missouri-based program "The Power Hour" which is carried mostly by independent and "patriot" radio stations. The program boasts an audience of several million listeners.
The duo has provided a transcript of an interview recently conducted with a Gulf War veteran who alleges that he participated in the covert detonation campaign of Kuwaiti oil wells, crafted to implicate Iraq, in order to "remove any doubts that Saddam Hussein and his regime were a terrible evil that had to be dealt with." This mission was allegedly necessary because "there was concern that America... might see this conflict as an unnecessary thing."
The talk show hosts, who gained notoriety for championing causes supporting Gulf War veterans, assert that this interview is bolstered by other independent testimonials they have received. "The information provided over a series of meetings with this veteran corroborates the reports from other veterans who are totally unconnected with this individual," the duo states in their press release.
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Tom's Hardware?
Is the review like similar reviews from Tom's?
Is Tom's still using Sysmark?
I figured out something was going on over there when Tom's remained silent on the IBM GXP hard drive issue. After that, on visits to the site, something about the reviews just didn't seem right. Now, my suspicions have been confirmed.
Go to AMDZone, click on Search, then use search term "Van" for third hand information on Tom's methods. -
What about the "fraud" over at Tom's?
Anybody forget the brouhaha happening over at Tom's Hardware? Check Van's site, and a few others. Tom's silence on the IBM GXP hard drive issue woke me up. After that, some of the articles just gave me a funny feel, or smelled like something was wrong. It looks like Van's site, AMD Zone and the Inquirer have confirmed my suspicions.
Go to amdzone, archives, search term---> Van or Van's, and read the sorry state of affairs. -
Oh bloody hell!
The downside? It is currently only going to available in a P4 chipset that Intel has not authorized.
Come on people! can't you plainly see the chips are on the table here!
This link clearly shows how Intel has known all along!
Open your eyes!!!! -
Re:Finally
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Tomshardware attacks integrity of vanshardwareThere have been some more developments around Van's Smith's review of the Bapco benchmark's. Tom Pabt's, the owner of tomshardware.com, has written an editorial condemning the journalistic integrity of Smith, and Kyle Bennett of hardocp.com.
Here are part 1 , part 2 , part 3 , part 4 and part 5 . Pabst's accusation is that Smith and Bennett have both written articles where they claimed to have discovered flaws in the benchmarks that make one manufacturer's product look good, when they were really being coached by the that manufacturer's rivals.
Here is Smith's rebuttal .
Van Smith used to work for Tom Pabst. In my opinion the quality and utility of tomshardware.com has gone down since Van Smith departed.
And, about this fight, I would say that Dr Pabst (he is an MD) hasn't learned the value of civility. In my opinion, in a fight like this one, people can't really follow the details, so they base their assessment of who is right, by looking to see who remains more civil.
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Another reason to forget about megahertzA recent article Benchmark Program Rewritten to Favor Intel? suggests even greater skepticism in evaluating the performance of intel CPUs.
This article Pandering to the Masses: Does Engineering Still Matter? explains how the Pentium III beat the Pentium 4. If the P3 and the P4 are run at the same clock speed the P3 performs much better than its anemic younger sibling.
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Re:Big deal
So you're saying that you lend no credence to the claim that Van's is biased towards AMD even though he says plainly on his site that he is their bitch?
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Re:should be open.
This would seem when Van's COMPREHENSIVE OPEN SOURCE BENCHMARK INITIATIVE (COSBI) would be useful... You could always get in touch with Van about helping out the project...
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Re:should be open.
Perhaps you should keep browsing Van's page then. He has an idea about making an open source benchmark using a standard compiler
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Kyle @ HardOCP covered this yesterday
Here's Kyle's 4th Edition post from yesterday. Excerpts from Van's comments are in italics.
VansHardware & AMD: There is a report on VansHardware this morning that visits the differences between BAPCo's SysMark 2001 and SysMark 2002. The report's basic theme is that SysMark 2002 is skewed towards making the Intel Pentium 4 results look better than the AMD CPU results could have looked. It basically shows examples of things that were changed in SysMark 2002 that cherry pick areas in certain programs that the Pentium 4 excels at. While the article might seem to be work done by VansHardware there is something you need to know. All of the data shown in that article has been put together by AMD and not VansHardware. Take note of this one statement in the article.
However, AMD has been able to "pick the lock" on SysMark to gain a much keener understanding into the internal workings of these tests.
VansHardware is not the one with the "keener understanding", AMD is.
The original PDF document from AMD is linked for download so the fact that this data is not Van's is not exactly hidden either.
Also their opening paragraphs state this.
At this moment we will pause from the long march through our benchmark results to revisit the significant issues regarding BAPCo's SysMark 2002 brought up by AMD during our recent meeting with representatives from that chipmaker.
We must state up front that despite the condemning information divulged to us, the AMD spokesmen repeatedly expressed support and guarded optimism for the reformation of BAPCo.
The "significant issues" and "condemming information" shown were not harvested by VansHardware, actually all they do is interject a little bit of commentary.
AMD has verified to me this morning that all of the graphed and tabled data shown on the VansHardware report is data that has been mined by AMD. Does this make the data inaccurate? Of course not, but I am sure that it hardly shows both sides of the story. AMD is not going to supply VansHardware with information that makes Intel look good. VansHardware represents to me, nothing more than an AMD fansite that takes shots at Intel every chance they get. I think they are far from what anyone could consider objective journalist and reporters. Them doing a cut and paste job with AMD's data goes to show that as true in my opinion. Websites get fed information all the time, trust us, we know. It is our jobs to go back and prove data and claims in our labs on our own time, not to repost corporate data, that can be considered far from objective. Independent sites in our hardware community should not be reposting PR spin in such a way as this. There is a fine line here but I think this is stepping across it.
VansHardware does not exactly hide the fact that the data shown is not theirs but rather AMD's, but they certainly did not seem to represent that in an upfront manner so the reader sees the information for being exactly what it is...data released by the AMD PR machine.
I am a huge AMD fan but I just don't like big companies being able to pump their corporate data into our community when it is not presented as such. I think AMD should have the balls to post information like this on their own website and not try and "slip it in" through a back door. In fact, I would consider the information to be much more credible if it were posted on AMD's own website as AMD research.
I know Van has gotten upset here recently with his past employer removing his name from articles he has written. It seems to me that Van has done little to deserve his name being on this article and it should show authored by AMD.
(ED NOTE - This is referring to some allegedly plagiarised articles that Tom's Hardware published after removing Van's name from them)
Also worthy of mentioning is that AMD is now fully working with BAPCo, which they have not done in the past. AMD has had the ability to work with BAPCo for a long time now to make sure their products get represented properly and we are certainly happy to finally see AMD join the party to give the boat a more even keel.
Lastly, another tidbit worth throwing into the mix is that Van Smith, owner of VansHardware, possibly either works for or is contracted to VIA as a CPU validation tester. We are working on a confirmation of this from VIA now. Do we need hardware websites that do work for the companies they end up reporting on? Just another thing to consider when objectivity is in question. -
Kyle @ HardOCP covered this yesterday
Here's Kyle's 4th Edition post from yesterday. Excerpts from Van's comments are in italics.
VansHardware & AMD: There is a report on VansHardware this morning that visits the differences between BAPCo's SysMark 2001 and SysMark 2002. The report's basic theme is that SysMark 2002 is skewed towards making the Intel Pentium 4 results look better than the AMD CPU results could have looked. It basically shows examples of things that were changed in SysMark 2002 that cherry pick areas in certain programs that the Pentium 4 excels at. While the article might seem to be work done by VansHardware there is something you need to know. All of the data shown in that article has been put together by AMD and not VansHardware. Take note of this one statement in the article.
However, AMD has been able to "pick the lock" on SysMark to gain a much keener understanding into the internal workings of these tests.
VansHardware is not the one with the "keener understanding", AMD is.
The original PDF document from AMD is linked for download so the fact that this data is not Van's is not exactly hidden either.
Also their opening paragraphs state this.
At this moment we will pause from the long march through our benchmark results to revisit the significant issues regarding BAPCo's SysMark 2002 brought up by AMD during our recent meeting with representatives from that chipmaker.
We must state up front that despite the condemning information divulged to us, the AMD spokesmen repeatedly expressed support and guarded optimism for the reformation of BAPCo.
The "significant issues" and "condemming information" shown were not harvested by VansHardware, actually all they do is interject a little bit of commentary.
AMD has verified to me this morning that all of the graphed and tabled data shown on the VansHardware report is data that has been mined by AMD. Does this make the data inaccurate? Of course not, but I am sure that it hardly shows both sides of the story. AMD is not going to supply VansHardware with information that makes Intel look good. VansHardware represents to me, nothing more than an AMD fansite that takes shots at Intel every chance they get. I think they are far from what anyone could consider objective journalist and reporters. Them doing a cut and paste job with AMD's data goes to show that as true in my opinion. Websites get fed information all the time, trust us, we know. It is our jobs to go back and prove data and claims in our labs on our own time, not to repost corporate data, that can be considered far from objective. Independent sites in our hardware community should not be reposting PR spin in such a way as this. There is a fine line here but I think this is stepping across it.
VansHardware does not exactly hide the fact that the data shown is not theirs but rather AMD's, but they certainly did not seem to represent that in an upfront manner so the reader sees the information for being exactly what it is...data released by the AMD PR machine.
I am a huge AMD fan but I just don't like big companies being able to pump their corporate data into our community when it is not presented as such. I think AMD should have the balls to post information like this on their own website and not try and "slip it in" through a back door. In fact, I would consider the information to be much more credible if it were posted on AMD's own website as AMD research.
I know Van has gotten upset here recently with his past employer removing his name from articles he has written. It seems to me that Van has done little to deserve his name being on this article and it should show authored by AMD.
(ED NOTE - This is referring to some allegedly plagiarised articles that Tom's Hardware published after removing Van's name from them)
Also worthy of mentioning is that AMD is now fully working with BAPCo, which they have not done in the past. AMD has had the ability to work with BAPCo for a long time now to make sure their products get represented properly and we are certainly happy to finally see AMD join the party to give the boat a more even keel.
Lastly, another tidbit worth throwing into the mix is that Van Smith, owner of VansHardware, possibly either works for or is contracted to VIA as a CPU validation tester. We are working on a confirmation of this from VIA now. Do we need hardware websites that do work for the companies they end up reporting on? Just another thing to consider when objectivity is in question. -
Read the linked article
As compilers become tuned to exploit this, it's plausible that the Athlon's performance is going to lag quite a bit more than it already does. That there is some benchmark out there that is specifically designed to show off this strength of the P4 is no real surprise to anyone, is it?
That's not the complaint at all. Read the linked article. The complaint is that Sysmark 2002 has been systematically altered relative to Sysmark 2001 so as to favour the P4 over Athlon.
For example, the PhotoShop test in Sysmark 2001 had 13 filters, of which 8 run faster on the Athlon and 5 faster on P4. The Sysmark 2002 PhotoShop test has 6 filters, of which 3 are filters from Sysmark 2001 on which P4 wins and the other 3 are additions on which the P4 also wins. The 8 filters on which the Athlon does better have all been removed.
There are several other examples in the article. Read the article
BTW, an interesting point is that this whole thing is basically an AMD publication that AMD have chosen to proxy via Van's. Van is at least open about it. The AMD presentation containing all the information in that article is linked at the end and is available here
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several more 2600+ reviews
There are several more 2600+ reviews, and these are much better too.
AMDZone.com
Hot Hardware
Tech-Report
Overclockers.com.au
Ace's Hardware
Firing Squad
Hexus
xbit
Anandtech
Van's Hardware
VIA Hardware
The Inquirer -
I am losing trust in Tom's Hardware guide...
The article later states that benchmarks would be more reliable. However, I've seen some benchmarks saying that the Athlon is a lot slower than the P4 (at least on Tom's Hardware)...
Tomshardware.com has published some articles that really knocked the stuffing out of Intel. They published articles which exposed the failure of the Pentium 1.137 gigahertz. They exposed the poor performance of the Rambus memory.
But for the last year or too they seemed to be taking a lot softer line towards Intel. I was puzzled over this. Until recently, when I came across the following article about a former columnist at Tomshardware. He has his own hardware site now. If I understood this article properly, Tom re-edited and re-attributed Van Smith's articles, after his departure. And it sounds like when he was caught he yanked all of them. Altering the past like in 1984.
They are definitely all gone now.
I can't help wondering whether his departure was connected to THG cozying up to Intel.