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

Re:Missing the point

[Geek In Training]

The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.

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:" ... I think you can use those numbers for educating yourself before making a purchase with some degree of confidence.

Re:TradeOffs between Intel and AMD Cpu

[BlackSol]

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.

Re:PR Rating Stupidity and lightwave benchmarks

[tcc]

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.