Intel Funds AMD-bashing Report

Jim Norton writes "The Inqwell and ZDNet are reporting that the Aberdeen group, who recently published a report attacking the Athlon XP's processor rating system, was funded by Intel to produce the report. The articles also mention that AMD claims they were never contacted for information regarding this issue." From the benchmarks that various outfits have done on the new AMD chips, their model number is actually pretty conservative.

Comments

CPU Benchmarks mean nothing

[BWJones]

I use Athalons, Pentiums, MIPS and PowerPC machines routinely and all these CPU benchmarks being pushed around mean absolutely nothing except in direct comparison to other CPU's in identical motherboards with identical RAM, hard drives, bus speeds etc etc etc... with overall performance depending upon RAM controllers, amount of cache and its integration and control, and OS latency among other reasons. For instance, if one were to examine the bandwidth of the different bus designs one would see that Athalon XP's with a 200Mhz bus and DDR DRAM push about 700 MB per second whereas the P4 designs can more than double that for the simplest of operations. However, sustained activity for the P4 is actually lower than the Athalon, perhaps 600 MB per second revealing why slower P3's can actually outperform the latest P4's.

As an aside, the latest G4's from Apple typically move around 1000 MB per second sustained and can push even faster when using Altivec. Why Intel did not go after Apple, Motorola, IBM, Sun, and MIPS with their FUD about clock speeds I don't know. This whole thing was probably started by someone in marketing.