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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.
Personally, I've been running an Athlon XP 1600+ (1400MHz) since the month the processor was released. It spanks my friend's P4 1.7GHz hands down, both in the "gaming benchmark" department, as well as the "look and feel" of the system during use. One unfair advantage I have, though, is that my system was built with 512 megs of DDR RAM, and he has the same amount in PC133. DDR support for the P4 is a "recent" development compared with the Athlon platform.
I mean, let's face it... if you're building a system (which I'm sure many of us here do), how can you beat a $52 ECS K7S5A from NewEgg, coupled with a $120 Athlon XP 1700+ processor (boxed with heatsink and 3 year warranty), versus $100 for a P4 mobo and $165 for the processor? Even the MHz disparity between the rating and the actual clock is lost in price/performance comparisons.
The only people buying Intel are big OEMs and end users who still haven't given up the idea that AMD is an "incompatible clone processor." (Yes, some of these clueless folks still exist, brainwashed by marketeers during the K5 days.)
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.
(Full disclosure: I own stock in neither company, and run both platforms at home: AMD and Intel.)
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and gartner still recommended that people ditch IIS for apache... damn IIS must really suck!
AMD and Intel can argue for as long as they like about whose benchmarks are rigged, but it doesn't change the fact that, in the end, they are just that - benchmarks. They bear absolutely no resemblence to real life performance whatsoever. In the end, it doesn't matter what the graphs say or who claims to be faster that whom.
:)
If you're going to start sueing people for misleading the public into buying products by presenting them with misleading data, then any hardware or software vendor who uses a benchmark in their marketing literature should be prosecuted.
The hierarchy is thus: lies, damned lies, statistics... benchmarks.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Since I can not link directly to this article I will quote Kyle from HardOCP.com - and as of 8:18 CST March 28th, this can still be found on the Front Page of www.hardocp.com.
I just off the phone with the fine folks over at AMD and was discussing the issues over the Aberdeen Group white paper. Aberdeen, if you are unfamiliar with them, claims to be a Market Analysis company. If this is all new to you, please visit the InqWell as well as ZDNet on this issue.
There are two situations in this issue that are fun to look at. If you go read the white paper entitled AMD's Gigahertz Equivalency: Inexperienced Buyers Accept Bad Science, published here (and you will have to sign up) you will notice that Aberdeen uses flawed logic to pick on AMD's model numbering system of their CPUs.
Nevertheless, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) last year deliberately took a step down a slippery slope of bad science when it named its Athlon XP line of microprocessor models with clock-speed gigahertz ratings equivalent to Intel's competing Pentium 4 (P4), based on a set of application
benchmarks audited by Arthur Andersen and fully described in AMD vs. Intel comparisons at AMD's Web site.
And then..
What's the flaw in AMD's equivalency ratings? There are many discussed in this Aberdeen Executive White Paper. The key flaw is that the equivalency rating is a snapshot in a moment in time -- and time surely marches on in the computer industry -- making the gigahertz equivalency subject to increasing variance over time. For example, the AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor announced last fall runs at 1.667 GHz. The 2000+ equivalency rating is aimed at Intel's P4 2.0 GHz Willamette processor.
Aberdeen seems clueless that the basis for AMD's model numbering system is a comparison to their own TBird core CPUs and the speed they would have to run to be equivalent to a Palomino core CPU in performance. Seems as though Aberdeen did not even contact AMD in order to better understand the exact subject they were commenting on.
The other part of this situation is this. It is now being rumored that Intel paid for the white paper.
But the INQUIRER learned from Intel this morning that it paid for the report to be written, which certainly puts a different complexion on the thrust of the piece. Intel maintains, however, that fact doesn't affect the objectivity of the Aberdeen Group's findings. Cough.
While I have no idea of the validity of this claim, I will tell you this. I think of all of these "market analysis" companies as no more than paid mouthpieces of the hardware industry. Some are scumbags that make a living off taking a product and making it look good to distributors and consumers. They are spinmeisters looking for a buck and will spin their "truths" to support their clients needs. If you think market analysis companies are in this hardware industry to make sure that you, the consumer, get the truth, you are sadly mistaken. Is this to say all anylysts bad and are always wrong? Of course not, but I give them about as much credibility as a 4th grader with a Geocities site. At least the 4th grader most likely has purer motives.
I think it was one of these industry analysts that referred to sites such as our own as "homebrewed" and that we bascially did not deserve the voice that we have in the hardware community. I guess even we piss off the analysts when we uncover the truth that does not agree with their spin.
Anyway, this is all my opinion and subject to just flat being wrong but there is one thing I will tell you for sure and that is that the hardware industry has a nasty underbelly just about like every other industry in this world.
UPDATE: From the cards and letters we have gotten on this subject everyone seems to be missing the point of my little diatribe posted above. The rating methodology wars are over in my mind, and have been for a long time now as Aberdeen is way late to this party. The opinion I want you know about analyst companies is that they are simply all bought and paid for and expected to spin the agenda of their client.
Also, Intel did share with us tonight that they did finance the Aberdeen research into the AMD rating system.
As long as you guys are smart enough to form your own opinions and thoughts, which most of your are, just make sure you don't let these "analyst" companies shape your opinions as some are nothing more than a PR company that runs a couple of benchmarks. In this case Aberdeen based their entire opinion on BABPCo Sysmark 2001 and Quake III numbers.
You guys would hunt me down and whip my ass if I ever gave you a review based on that little data.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
It may be unimportant for YOU, but for some, it does matter. My server is in a seperate room, and I care little enough about noise that I haven't even put the cover back on from the latest hardware upgrade. Even with the cover on, my longest uptime was about 20 days... and would be longer, if I didn't turn it off for out of town trips.
I don't know what you're doing wrong, since I haven't had any problems with either of my machines. Maybe it's your motherboard or memory.
FWIW, I run an 850 Athlon Classic as my server, and a dual MP 1800+ for my workstation, and I've only had stability problems in Windows(from flaky video drivers). I also work with a cluster of 40 Dual Athlons(mixed 1.2 and 1800+), and the only failure I've seen is a bad Myrinet card. Though the room is noisy, each individual machine is fairly quiet.
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Based on this data, what really happened, what is really happening, and what disinterested parties seem to believe, I would conclude that the AMD PR Rating system provides a very nice comparison of Athlon performance relative to P4 performance at the clockspeed of the PR rating.
Intel funded FUD or not, the thrust of the report is because the PR ratings are based on pseudo-objective measurements, they are ultimately confusing to buyers.
Mhz might be a very poor buying consideration, but at least it's an objective number, unlike AMD's rating system. Thus AMD has put the informed buyer (such as yourself) in the position where you need to independently "conclude" whether it's fair or not. No matter what we all think about the P4 2.2A, we all conclude unanimously that it actually runs at ~2.2Ghz.
Even someone like you who is informed and thinks highly of AMD CPUs have confused the PR Rating as a "Pentium Rating" -- it's actually (supposedly) a benchmark comparison with a 1Ghz K7 chip, not a Pentium 4.
In practice though, AMD bumps up 66Mhz and adds 100 PR points every time. As you point out, everytime they do this, their lead at a particular "rating" becomes narrower over Intel. If I was them, I'd be very worried about the perception that they over-speced the PR numbers -- if the "2500+" chip benchmarks slower than a P4 2.5Ghz, they are going to be blasted to high heaven -- even it's supposedly not a directly comparsion.
The other issue is that AMD is trying to make inroads into the server and workstation markets, and it's really questionable if "PR" ratings are needed there.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
Mhz ratings are not only confusing, they are misleading.
Not only are you correct, but I should like to point out that there are large numbers of average joes who don't even know what a megahurtz rating means. To them, it really isn't anything concreate or objective, it's just a number. If it were implicitly communicated to them that this rating was a measurment of speed, and then they bought a computer which had a higher mhz than another computer only to later see this computer perform more slowly than the other, they would feel deceived. Or at least stupid.
C//
You are ignoring the fact that many CPU-intensive programs are optimised separately for Athlon vs P4. Vendors often use MMX, SSE, SSE2, and 3DNow! instructions to speed up critical algorithms. The P4 doesn't support 3DNow! and the Athlon doesn't support SSE2.
(OT: Even when a CPU does support a specific extension package, it may or may not provide a benefit. You'll see this if you dig into the internals of the Linux software RAID code, specifically RAID5. A RAID5 array stores not only your disk data but also one copy of "parity" information, which must be tediously calculated for all blocks of all disk writes. Ingo Molnar wrote several RAID 5 parity implementations for MMX etc, and at boot time, the code takes a couple seconds to automatically benchmark which is the fastest for the current CPU. It turns out that (if I remember correctly) the 3DNow! version isn't used on the K6-2 since, oddly enough, the code written for non-MMX Pentium is faster. The 3DNow! code is used on the Athlon, though.)
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