Slashdot Mirror
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.
Microsoft funds for reports on Linux, Intel refunds for reports on AMD. I guess if you don't like someone you just pay someone off to blast your target. I was under the stupid impression that this kind of thing was sort of frowned on.
I really don't know anywhere that would print something hostle just because it was pro one OS or the other...opss damn..nevermind.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
I really have to shake my head in amazement that Intel of all things would do such a report in the first place.
People already know that thanks to the vastly more modern CPU core, the AMD Athlon CPU core on a true per MHz basis is way faster than any Intel CPU. The proof of the pudding is this: the current AMD Athlon XP 2100+ running at 1,733 MHz actually out-performs the Pentium 4 running at 2,200 MHz on several benchmark tests, and of course the AMD CPU is quite a bit less expensive, too.
I think the report was done as a pre-emptive strike against the upcoming AMD Thoroughbred CPU's, which should be out very soon.
any episode of "Law and Order" or any other court show - once the horse has left the barn it's too late to all but the most informed. "So, Mr. defendant, you remember trying to stuff an Intel PentiumPro up his butt!!" Objection!! but it's too late. The Jury has already heard it. This report is no different. You will read about how bogus this report may/may not be somewhere on the web but I'll hear from my customers that they saw a report saying that AMD chips are slow/prone to failure/catch on fire/whatever.
ya got it.
Intel has taken a page from government officials. Many "reasearch" products are funded by governement officials.
To the researcher getting this money is generally is better to give the results that the governement official wants to see rather then the truth. That way the researcher has a higher chance of being rehired since his/her results were liked.
Business as usual is right, Intel just got caught.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.
... I think you can use those numbers for educating yourself before making a purchase with some degree of confidence.
This is true for proprietary benchmarks run by companies against their own products.
But for benchmarking apps developed by third parties and used by fourth parties to compare and review hardware, I don't think this rings true. Things like Q3bench (which checks real-world performance by running timedemos) and MadOnion 3DMark (which tests graphics capabilities and performance in various areas) are very handy for testing video cards by review sites.
I mean, a lot of people have used Prime95 and RC5-64 clients to review processors over the past four years, since they are so CPU-intensive. (Er, they take 100% of available CPU cycles.) Therefore, you can judge how well certain processors can handle certain types of operations by seeing how many blocks they can crunch in an hour.
The problem is that certain apps are going to run better on certain processors because of a harmony between the processor design and the heavily-used commands in the app. Like the fact that a G4 (with Velocity Engine! er, AltiVec unit)will totally spank a P4 twice its clockspeed in RC5.
So the *good* reviewers out there run a battery of tests, including graphics, processor-intensive apps, memory-intesive apps, etc. to get a good, holistic representation of performance. They can then replicate that battery of tests on other hardware to compare performance with a reasonable degree of accuracy.
If a company says, "We used our own IntelMark tests to determine that we are the fastest processor ever," that's marketing crap. If [H]ardOCP says "We ran the P4 and the Athlon XP though 58 tests developed by third parties, and here are the results:"
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
You missed the biggest point: Cost/performance.
AMD chips have been shown over and over again to provide greater performance at less cost than Intel.
$sig=$1 if($brain =~
Intel is clearly running scared on the news that AMD has taken nearly thirty percent of the desktop x86 processor sales market. Their monopoly is in jeopardy; so quick! let's buy some negative press for the competition.
If AMD's share is really thirty percent, then you may need to stop calling Intel a monopoly. Buying negative press also tends to blow up in your face.
(Full disclosure: I may own small amounts of stock in either or both companies; I don't really know.)
From the ZDNet article:
AMD's insistence on IPC is also misguided, Dunford says, since the Pentium chip has to execute fewer instructions than the Athlon XP.
Okay, they've got to be referring to the fact Athlons are really a CISC-to-RISC architecture that translates the x86 instructions into an internal RISC ISA. One CISC instruction would typically correspond to more than one RISC instruction, so yes, it would be executing more RISC instructions than a Pentium would execute CISC instructions...but this is deceptive.
I'm a user running a program who wants the program to finish ASAP. To me, the processor is a black box that takes instructions from my program and does whatever it needs to so the program finishes ASAP. As a user I DO NOT CARE that it changes to RISC internally. All I care about is it executing my program, which is a set of CISC instructions. If you run the same program on an Athlon and a Pentium they will both execute the same number of CISC instructions...they have to...otherwise one of them is not correct. So as long as the IPC number AMD is using is in terms of number of CISC instructions per cycle, they certainly do have a valid comparison and are not misguided as this guy says.
I'm not sure if this has been said or not (I didn't see any posts, but I might have missed one.) so I'll say it anyway.
How much will this report will really matter? In the average consumer sector, where the PR rating was really intended for (to combat the perceived performance vs. megahertz gab with Intel), they probably will never see or hear about this report.
Its not going to have much effect in that case, but even in the business sector, what's the chance it will make a difference? AMD has been working on building a business end to their products for awhile now, and I doubt that this would make much of a difference to those efforts. Most if the people that would be in the marked for an AMD from that area ought to know about the PR and likewise would be more likely too actually look at reviews/benchmarks/etc than base all their decisions off of what really amounts to just hype, which this report, and notably enough, the AMD PR rating both are. Though perhaps I'm giving business buyers too much credit...
forma3
Who really gives a rat's ass? I run a dual PII Xeon 450 system on a motherboard I got from Supermicro (case too) and it just goes. I have NEVER had a problem with this system. My next systemis going to be a dual P4 Xeon running on a motherboard from Supermicro because I'm happy with the stability my current system provides. The difference in times tasks are completed in these benchmarks aren't enough to make me want to switch to an AMD. Who cares if a 3D scene finishes 5 minutes later? I set my machines to render during downtimes anyway. Who cares if Photoshop can perform the lighting effects filter 1.5 seconds faster? I surely don't. What I care about is not having to worry about the latest VIA drivers wrecking my system or hoping the bargain motehrboard I purchased for my AMD CPU won't gie me problems in 6 months. I stick with Intel because it just plain works, no worries.
I might add, this is because some Lightwave portion of the rendering pipeline are heavily optimized for SSE2. The benchmarks on tom's hardware are flawed because he uses a scene that 95% of the calculations are SSE2-based (radiosity) and it's a known fact that it's heavily optimized (so it's clearly not a balanced scenario). If they'd use standard raytracing, you wouldn't see such a jump. In fact we use lightwave where I work, I am a lightwave fan since 2.0, and I've built up a renderfarm based on Dual XP athlon solution (with tigerMP and yes it works with bios 2.03). I don't even want to touch a dual P4 solution, clearly not a good bang for the buck even if it's faster in some (clearly not all) cases.
Again, When you look at tom's benchmarks you tend to think like if the P4 would be almost 50% faster than AMD, when you'll render balanced stuff (which is most cases I've seen and besides, nobody will do a fully animated short with "radiosity" on, it takes forever to render, so you render 1 and use the "baking" function, so you revert to raytracing or standard rendering after that), the margin grows way thinner. When you calculate the costs, Intel is way out of range for price/performance. A lot of people told tom about his LW benchmark, but as usual, he didn't acknowledge nor changed his ways (there have been benchmark data available and howto's on the net for lightwave since 4.0 on multiple platform, he doesn't seem to want to follow the "standard" thus invalidating his work to the eyes of the LW community checking the benchmark numbers. But that's another story.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
1 out of three processors in use is not AMD, but for recent quarters, of the new processors shipped, 30% of desktop PC procs were amd.
This is not true anymore. The only reason that was true was at that point in time Intel was able to make the top speed procs in large quantity. However, the demand for low speed procs was still high, so they just sold procs that could run much faster at a lower speed. However, you never knew which procs could be overclocked safely.
Why did they do this? Money. They could make more money selling 'slower' chips to people at a slightly reduced cost because of volume.
AMD rates and equates themselves with the "Industry Standard" that Intel has set forth. I have used and recommended AMD CPU's since they were able to produce a chip that met or beat anything Intel has ever produced. I did not care what the marketing was, other than the speed I was running to the speed I WOULD be running. Truth in advertising? Wake up and smell the Athlon burning....and Intel choking on the fumes
You keep going until you die..."Me".
For a long time, the majority of the intel motherboards were MUCH more stable then the majority of the amd motherboards, though intel boards had their share of turkeys as well (820 anyone?). The trick had been to find the rare stable amd motherboard, learn every aspect of it, make sure the bios was up to date, etc. The tyan trinty 100 AT was a great k6-2 board, and my email server to this day runs on it without any problems. Most of the k6-2 boards werent very good though :( When the kt133 and kt133a chipsets started coming out, I noticed that there was a LOT more in the way of stable amd boards. In fact, very few were "unstable" after a few bios revisions. Also, the VIA 4-in-1 drivers improved radically as well.
At the current state of processors and motherboards, i feel that the AMD/VIA platform is as reliable as the Intel/Intel platform. The majority of current market VIA boards are quite mature and reliable and when problems are encountered, often a simple bios upgrade resolves it quickly. The intel 850 and 845 boards are also equally reliable. So the decision comes down to the 3 P's, preference, price, and performance. Some people refuse to use Intel for political reasons, and thats ok. Some people refuse to use AMD because of bad experiences with previous generation motherboards, and thats understandable too. Most of the expericened hardware consultants that i know of are currently pushing AMD solutions due to the better price / performance of AMD solutions now, as well as the fact that the P-4 on the vast majority of benchmarks is no faster then a competing Athlon XP, and often slower on high performance benchmarks such as 3d rendering.
The point of my whole rant.......With 90% of modern motherboards and processors, your going to have a stable platform as long as you configure it correctly (yes, even Intel stuff will crash on you right and left if you have a poorly configured bios, and a lot of default bios options are cruddy). It all comes down to the 3 P's.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
C'mon the only thing 'frowned' upon by a corporate world is getting caught, or failing to make a profit. Frowning on an act would indicate some remedial conscience or morals, and as we see everyday corporations have NONE. That is not to say the individuals that make up those corps are bad but if everyone 'just follows orders', Lemmings Inc. will be as dirty as they come.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
MHz can be just as misleading as the PR numbers. As I'm sure you're aware, there's a lot more that goes into CPU performance than just the MHz speed. You have to take the whole architecture into consideration. So, until and unless an objective, independent, accurrate benchmark (or set of benchmarks) is agreed upon by CPU manufacturers, I don't fault either of them for choosing to advertise in a way that is beneficial to them. While it might seem reasonable to expect people to understand that an Athlon can perform as well as a higher-clocked Pentium, consumers really don't understand anything except which number is higher, nor are they interested in learning. Sales people don't want to deal with it either. It makes them look like they're trying to hustle the customer. I think the PR ratings are pretty accurate, and even err on the conservative side. I don't see any foul here.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer