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
And in other news, business as usual continued yet again today. Analysts continue to be shocked.
NO CARRIER
As we can see now, Intel is the Evil Empire and losing more and more all the time. They're so scared.h
I don't know why... but I always disliked Intel and had a weak for AMD for the last couple of years... must be something psychological. Kinda like "the big-bad-wolfy-Intel" harassing AMD.
"The majority is always sane, Louis." -- Nessus
http://slashdot.jp
When AMD released the Athlon XP 1800+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications, the XP 1800+ not only beat the P4 1800 MHz, but also the P4 2000 MHz.
When AMD released the Athlon XP 1900+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications, the XP 1900+ not only beat the P4 1900 MHz, but also the P4 2000 MHz.
When Intel released the Northwood 2000 and 2200 MHz P4s and AMD released the XP 2000+, every reviewer on the planet ran a battery of benchmarks and concluded that for most applications the XP 2000+ beat the P4 2.0A but could not quite beat the P4 2.2A
Then when AMD released the XP 2100+, many reviewers concluded that it tied or beat the P4 2.2A, although I really think that the 2.2A has the edge.
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. Even though AMD says the rating is to compare the Athlon XP to other AMD products, it is incredible how well it scales athlon performance to the P4 performance at the clockspeed of the rating.
Therefore, if I wished to buy a machine, as a general purpose user, I think the best way to compare prices would be to match the AMD PR Rating against the Intel P4 clockspeed.
OTOH, comparing raw clockspeeds would give a false conclusion that an Athlon XP 2000+ would not outperform a P4 1.7 GHz. Sure, this is true if you plan on using Newtek Lightwave (where all P4s beat all Athlons), but for most tasks you would be horribly in error.
It would seem fairly obvious, that for this point in time, and with the current set of processors available, for the user who uses a variety of applications, the consumer would be better informed by using the AMD rating system than by just about any other comparison (other than carefully studying a battery of 30 different benchmarks)
However, there has been a flurry of criticism of the PR rating.
As much as I hate to cheerlead corporations, I just have to yell...
FUD!
...and anyone who disagrees with me is invited to study any of the following review sites:
Tom's Hardware
Anandtech
XBitLabs
Sharky Extreme
Lost Circuits
etc... etc... etc...
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.
From what i've read, it requires registration to view it.
-- Jim
Intel has always been a dirty player if you ask me... They have done everything to crush opposition - from TV commercials to getting pushy with the competition... Now they're making false rumors. Wonderful.
--NovaScorpio
Matt
Worse has been seen in this case, quote:
A set of URLs on www.gartner.com are "the Microsoft site";
Microsoft "sponsors" this "site", and paid unspecified fees to Gartner Group related to the content...
Talking about my boss's single most trusted source of information.... *shrug*
I used to cringe everytime I went into bestbuy for something and listened to them explaining things to customers.
That was fast. Nine comments and already the site is choking...
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1103-869796.html
Wacky domain name.
if Intel would have "saved" that money and instead lowered the price of there processors compared to those of AMD there may have never been a need for such a report.
.. maybe one should say, starting to hit back at Intel.
But as it stands now, AMD is more bang for the buck. They have there shop in order and are no longer "following" Intel, but being competitive, no
Intel is not running scared, but there starting to wonder wtf is going on and why people are not flocking to thier computers when hearing their chimes.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
This is somewhat offtopic, but I just thought I'd share this. I had a lot of problems with my AMD Athlon XP 1700+ with an Asus A7V133-C motherboard in Linux. I thought it was the Athlon/AGP bug, but the fixes for that didn't help. Programs kept segfaulting/causing bus errors, and sometimes the system hang.
Then I happened to find an upgrade to my BIOS, flashed it and suddenly everything worked perfectly. If you have weird problems that you can't seem to get fixed, try to look for a BIOS update! It's always a good idea, even if your system works, to check for new BIOSes regulary.
With every AMD processor release, they publish benchmarks, in addition to the benchmarks from toms hardware, Hardocp, anantech, and a slew of others. I was shopping one day, and noticed a set of Intel benchmarks touting the P4's. But when you looked closley.. you noticed that Intel benchmarks the pentiums AGAINST THEMSELVES... the P4's on the bar chart were rated very high. Against the pIII. It sickens me. Anyone with any tech skills knows that AMD puts out better chips, and I think this report is just intels way of trying to draw heat of them in light of AMD's new Hammerhead chip. Intel is running scared
Fire in the hands of the village idiot is no tool, but a weapon of mass destruction
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.
Everyone who tried an Athlon can confirm it's superiority to Intel's model line (even with AMD's stupid numbering), but the point is, the chipsets for Athlons are mainly crap. All AMD Athlon chipsets were fine, but most boards out there are sold with VIA chipsets which lead to lots of problems. Lots of people tell me they have problems and don't want any more Athlons, and don't realize at first that their problems were all related to the chipset. The same goes for notebooks. Intel has a good chipset solution, Amd doesn't.
So if anyone at AMD reads this: PLEASE MAKE SOME CHIPSETS, and I promise you, you'll sell more Athlons.
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.)
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
in this small pdf file (a mirror I made), that talks about the PR rating AMD is using which is bad, and that the intel P4 2GHz is bettar, you can clearly see in the properties of the PDF that it has been created on a Mac!!! so WTF, Intel bash AMD processor, using a PPC cpu to make the report :)
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
AMD seems to be aware of this. I read somewhere on the web (maybe here) that for the next gen (hammer ?) of AMD chips, they designed the chipset right along with or in advance of the processor.
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
Seems that the guys over at ID software have been the paying Gamespot to benchmark Quake and Unreal.
"It seems they have tained the pure nature of our business by funding this research into frag count. It is just, low down and dirty" said on game that refused to be identified. This is the latests in a long string of rumors about funding benchmarking test by game companies.
The issue at heart is frag count, the dismemberment of your pray or enemy in the 3d first person shooters. "Dude, just because that artical had some lame ass gimps playing the tester and he was able to blast some ass chunks all down the air duct does not mean that that aging Hexen is a better frag fest than Quake. I got some guys at work that can't strife, it is like taking candy from a baby." spat G-spotkilla from his cubical at a trendy NY base marketing company.
Probing for the female veiw I asked G-spotkilla's cube mate, code name HelloKitty her view on this whole thing "You know, G-spotkills is just a little gimp. He could not hit you with a sniper rifle at 30 feet let alone a g-spot!". Well it turns out she had not read the artical but she was hot, so I printed her concerns.
It seems no matter what people just don't believe the media anymore. G-spotkilla was last heard running down the hall screaming something about toenail polish and gravity problems that "Just don't work like that man!"
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
So, I guess it will be business as usual on Slashdot, commenting without actually reading the article.
However, from the summary, it does sound like they are taking the wrong tack. They claim that the AMD methodology is wrong, because they are using the wrong aspects of the processor to measure. However, the argument they completely ignore is that MHz is a stupid way to measure anything in the first place... Whatever. It certainly sounds purchased.
From all the articles I've seen on Tom's and elsewhere clearly state that the rating is a somewhat conservative way of comparing Intel and AMD.
Now, from my standpoint, I don't really care about Mhz (although whenever I upgrade, I want to double my Mhz!), I do care about relative performance and cost. It'd be nice if Intel and AMD (and others!) could agree on some benchmarking methodology, but baring that, AMD comparing their number with Intel Mhz does exactly what it needs to, helps people understand how AMD processors compare with Intel processors using Intel's own method, clock speed.
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
If this were on fark.com, it would have an obvious tag.
:)
I suppose if your more expensive, inferior product can't compete 1:1 with its competitor, you have to resort to something like this.
Although this appears to be a flamebait (intel's move, and yes, to an extent, my article), I think that the intel move is fairly irrelevant considering intel has a crapload of the market (i.e. OEM, businesses, etc) and it doesn't look like HPaq / IBM, etc will be switching to AMD.
Tho I have one thing positive to say about the p4, small chip, big ass heat sink, tres cool. If intel wants to increase its market share into the
"geek" community, sell a 4 lb copper heatsink w/ a window / light kit mounted on the chip
of copper on em, along with a window kit
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Both Intel and AMD subscribe to the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation's SPEC CPU2000 benchmark, but Dunford said it would be "misleading" to use its figures as a replacement for clock speed.
Dunford, who works for Intel, does not want the masses to realize that it is not clock speed (GHz) that is the ultimate measure of performance of a cpu. If that were to happen, people might buy more and more AMD's, or even Apple's for that matter. Intel wants to keep their market share, and they have the best partner in the business, Microsoft.
What if AMD formed a deal with some manufacturer, offered $11 per box (verus Microsoft's $10), only if the box's were sold with Linux?
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!
In my early-morning haze, that's how this headline reached my cortex. You can imagine how disappointed I am right now.
god is just pretend.
Intel :
:
:
:) )
:
Pros
Stability - Rip out the CPU fan, these would still run till kingdom come.
Heat Dissipation - As explained above, its above par than AMD cpus
Research - Constantly comes up with new technology. For e.g. AGP Pro and improvements to Chipset comes to mind.
Cons
FUD - Like to propogate FUD about competitors. Hence I have no sympathy towards them when they cry wolf at Microsoft.
Speed - If you look beyond the constant Mhz bumping is what they all been doing..
AMD - The Underdogs (Obviously a Slashdot fave because of the same fact
Pros :
Speed - Raw RAW SPEED!!!.. Enough said. Whoops Intels ass on a wide range of benchmarks.
Cons
Stability - Needs improvement. But then again, if you have a decent CPU fan and if you are not too keen on Overclocking, then you are good.
Chipset Issues - Quite obvious. AMD needs to improve on this.
Heat Dissipation - Stories about guys making scrambled egg on the CPU are not exaggerated.
Rapid Nirvana
A lot of us seem to dislike Intel because it appears they have been trying to form a monopoly in the CPU market. When you actually think about this, you'll start to see some parallels between Intel and MS (but not to the extent MS has gone, thank God). The big consumer OS out there is crap; I don't want my CPU to become crap also.
Personally, I like AMD because they are/were the underdog. They came out with a superior product, the K7, for a very reasonable price at the time it was needed most: when Intel released their "serial numbered" P3s. (Which is the primary reason why I don't respect Intel much anymore.)
SPEC
see the 1st quarter 2002 results for CPU2000
We use dual processor machines to run simulations (particle physics). We have 3 dual 1.7gig Xeon/RDRAM setups and several 1800+ MP/DDR setups. The 1800+ setups will complete the same amount of work as the xeons in 75% of the time! I thought they were better, but I didn't think they were that much better. That is a 1.53gig machine completeing the same work as a 1.7 gig machine (with faster memmory) in 75% of the time.
Our application, as you can imagine, is very floating point intensive.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
In order to read this document, you must be registered with Aberdeen.com. By accessing this publication, you agree to let Aberdeen share registration details with sponsors of the document. This enables Aberdeen to bring you this research at no charge.
Not only does Intel spread FUD, they also want to know who read it...
this might get you the report without signing in...
AMD is getting better in their CPU design, but after the whole K6 series (where finding a good cpu was like getting a good prize in a cracker jack box), i'm still very werry about purchasing AMD. I can honestly say that I have never had a problem with any intel processor; i do belive i've only come across maybe 3 DOA CPU's in the last 4 years (i work for a computer store, and we build our own systems) but AMD, i can remember going through about 4 CPU's before I found one that works, and these were all brand new out of the box CPU's. Our main supplier for CPU's stopped selling AMD because they were wasting too much money sending them back for RMA. Maybe i'll give AMD another chance after a few more generation of processors come out and they have a very low failure rate.
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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
From the article:
[AMD Spokesperson:] "We've always very firmly said that the numbers compare with the previous generation of Athlon, for consistency," the spokesman said. "We've worked hard at explaining it and making it clear."
AMD says officially that its model numbers reflect differences in performance between its current Athlon XP processors, based on the "Palomino" core, and the earlier Athlon chips.[...]Therefore, an Athlon XP 2100+ running at 1.73GHz, would achieve performance equivalent to a 2.1GHz version of an older Athlon.
Um, AMD is full of it. This is the first time I've ever heard that it compares with previous Athlons. And does that mean my Athlon 1.4 (non-Xp, thank you very much) is actually slower than a P4 at the same clockspeed? Don't think so.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
I would agree that the earlier VIA chipsets for AMD CPU's were not exactly great, but VIA has redeemed itself with the excellent VT266A chipset that properly supports DDR-SDRAM.
1. Intel chipsets are not very shiny either. BX was the last great chipset. Some 815-s are kind'a OK as long as you do not use all features, but overall current Intel chipsets are not as good as HX, BX and GX used to be.
2. Many problems are located in a pat of the chipset, more specifically in the case of most AMD mainboards this is VIA attempt at IDE. Via since the Apollo mainboards for Pentium 1 and K5 has always had problems implementing a decent IDE. If you are using linux you can simly get around this by buying a CMD649U based controller. They are usually frowned upon because of the multiple bugs in 640, but current ones are brilliant. I have used them for years on both Intel and Alpha and they solve most of the issues with having a VIA based Mainboard.Same goes for sound and network if present. In other words just ignore the Via peripherals and buy proper ones.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
IIRC, they're releasing the chipset -before- the CPU's so that there will actually be MB's available when the CPU's hit the streets.
I'm debating building a dual 1700MP or waiting until ClawHammer comes out and building a dualy with two of those *evilgrin*
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've had nothing but good with my AMD's, they've pretty much sold me unless something really weird happens. I got a prebuilt system - and the cheap guys who built it never got the fan on right so i was running my athlon 500 w/the fan mostly off for a decent while. only overheated once...and then I opened it up and took a closer look - whoops. I locked it on good and it hasn't come off since.
erobertstad - if you dont' want it, email me and maybe we can work something out - i collect old processor's anyways. An athlon 550 you say? And you've tried different hardware. hmm that is strange. Oh well look me up if you are interested.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
Did you mean fud in the Scottish sense? (fud def'n)
actually Intel has been going more and more against Microsoft. And AMD (at least according to an interview with AMD's CEO) has been working with microsoft to get their Hammer's paired with MS's new operating system. While there are parallels between the two company's ways of doing business, as you say...their alliance seems to be splitting.
An interesting thought: AMD teams with MS on it's next operating system, leaving Intel out in the cold...and Intel pushes Linux. Intel might lose market share as i think MS has a more powerful grip on its monopoly. But such a situation could only help AMD, and perhaps linux too. Or is it all just a crazy theory?
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?
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.
no link for you, but the other respondant is correct, AMD has publicly stated from the outset that the model rating is relative to the Tbird, not the P4.
Before you call someone full of it, do your research.
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.
I've been using AMD CPU's since the K6-2 hit the market. While the earlier AMD CPU's weren't as powerful as the equivalent clock speed P2's, they were much cheaper.
I look at overall value & performance like this: If I have a budget of $1500, what combination of parts is going to give me the best performance?
Most likely, a combination of AMD Athlon, VIA Chipset, and an ATI Radeon are gonna come out on top.
-- Liberalism is a mental disorder.
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Haha! Well, that isn't me ... i'm NOT fat-breasted! :P
-- Jim
This might have been something other than FUD even a year ago, but since the 266A chipset, I think Athlon platforms took the lead in this area too. Please read up on this widely-available news.
Speaking of chipsets, until quite recently I was very disappointed that I could not get an Athlon based system with PCI that was 64 wide @ 66 MHz, where you could get an Intel system that way.
From where I sit: I buy AMD for home use and have been pretty happy with the chips, but the mobos and cooling fans in my system have not been as reliable as I would like.
Meanwhile, at work, they buy Dells time after time for their proven reliability. Never mind that the price/performance ratio is atrocious, especially after you factor in the cost of the RDRAM that is frequently part of the Intel based systems.
If AMD wants a bigger slice of the corporate market, it should really look hard into partners that don't shove their chips into "cost-conscious" MOBOs at every turn.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I bet half of you are just sitting there hoping your Athalon catchs fire, its a geek status symbol. ;-)
The exciting sequel to MySQL Myths Debunked is AMD Myths Debunked! Laugh, cry, maybe share your experiences?
All of the people that shared their experiences with MySQL helped turn that document into a very useful weapon against nuisance naysayers. I'm hoping the same will happen for AMD.
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".
The Asus A7V is a perfect example of why AMD hasn't flourished as much as they could. While AMD's CPUs are consistently fast and reliable, the motherboards supporting them are an entirely different story.
I've been a big supporter of AMD ever since I got my first K6-200 MHz back in the day. Sure, FP performance wasn't that great, but at the time I didn't really need it. The chip cost much less than the Intel P200MMX and allowed me to splurge on getting that 3Dfx Voodoo I had always wanted. I was a happy camper.
Next year when I noticed that Quake II was a big sluggish on my system, I decided it was time for an upgrade. I got the K6-2 / 300 MHz and a Diamond Mulitmedia Monster3D - 2. The performance was so off-the-hook that I nearly wet my pants. About 30FPs (sometimes 60) in Quake II at 800x600. And again, I saved money by sticking with AMD.
Then in ~1999~2000, I start thinking about my next upgrade. The K6-2/300 has been a real pal, but Half-Life really needs a little more Umph to run well. Almost without thinking, I made what I thought was the next logical choice: AMD Athlon and Asus A7V.
This was, and probably will remain, the biggest system-builder mistake that I have ever made. First of all, the Athlon 800 CPUs ran into a shortage immediately after I ordered it, and left me with a completely assembled system sans CPU for weeks. When the Athlon CPU finally did arrive, the heatsink would not fit on the socket. After much frustration (and breaking one of the little plastic tabs off the socket), I gave up and exchanged the heatsink for a CoolerMaster. It fit perfectly over the CPU, and so I thought I was ready to start using my new system.
Enter the next phase of problems. After turning on my system, I noticed that the HDD LED wasn't working. Checking ASUS web site, there's an addendum to the manual which states that no, that LED doesn't work. Dammit. "Oh well," I thought, "I can live without it." So I pop in my Slackware 7 CD, boot up the system, and then get an inexplicable system freeze during the install. Tried it again, same thing - only at a totally different point of the intall. "Maybe it's a kernel bug", I thought. Well, I'll set up the Windows 98 partition and come back to Slackware later.
The windows 98 install went okay, except for a random blue-screen after setting the system date+time. But it seemed to work okay, so I just went along with it. I installed my drivers, installed my games, and moved the data from my old system to the new one.
Slowly, I start to notice things - my system seems to hang randomly; much more so than Win98 usually does. My MP3s start having little random sounds in them. My JPEGs have gotten colored streaks. My .ZIP files are corrupted. My DVD software crashes randomly.
I tried re-installing Win98, but the same problems come back. So I call tech support, and they asked me which DIMM slots I use, and what types of DIMMs are in there. I tell them I have 256M in the first slot and 128M in the 2nd. They ask me to move the 2nd DIMM into the 3rd slot. Bingo - data corruption problem solved.
But my system still hangs randomy. I try to fdisk, format, and re-install Windows 98, thinking that maybe some DLL got corrupted, but the random hangs still happen.
Finally, in despairation, I under-clock the FSB to 90MHz, the CPU to 720MHz, and the SDRAM to 90MHz 3-3-3. Now my system runs stable for the majority of the time, but still locks up randomly every now and then.
At that point, it's been about 28 months that I've had to put up with random crashes, data corruption, and general frustration to the point of wanting to throw my computer out the window. I will never, ever recommend an AMD-based system to anyone ever again, unless they find a way to increase the quality of hardware besides the CPU. I know that AMD CPUs are great, and I know that they have better value for the money, but the platform problems are simply not worth it.
My dad asked me what to buy last week, and I told him - Get a Dell Pentium 4 system. He bought it, and couldn't be happier.
So goodbye, AMD. We had some great times together, but it's over now. I wanted to keep using your products, but the platform problems have pushed me away. I will upgrade my computer soon, but there will not be an AMD CPU in it.
As soon as I get my shiney new Pentium 4, I will take my current AMD system and burn it to the ground.
this is old news, and hasn't really been true ever since the release of the K266a chipset. if you don't like VIA, you can go with the nForce chipset or the AMD 760. all three are far, far more reliable than the evil that was released to go along with those old slot athlons.
i could live a little longer in this prison
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 ?
the Nforce chipset is (thus far) showing itself to be solid, I'm using an SiS 735, and it's nice and solid, VIA make lousy but fast chipsets, ALI make stable but slow chipsets.
:)
Right now, I'm using an SiS 735 board with a 1700+ on it, and once I got rid of the useless Coolermaster heatsink that wasn't cooling the processor a damn, it's been nice and stable
Don't know if anyone remembers or not, but this is not the first time this PR thing has been tried. When the Pentium first came out, some cpu clone manufacturers adopted the PR rating, at least paritially because once Intel started using made up names for their chips, they couldn't (i.e. AMD could call their 486 a 486, Intel could not claim exclusive rights to the name since it only contained numbers). People like NexGen (remember them) used PR since (just like AMD) their chips, sorta, out performed Pentiums running at equivilent clock speeds. Once the NexGens of the world disappeared, PR feel out of favor, until now (though I think that maybe Cyrix still uses it?)
Alas, when Joe Sixpack shops for a machine, the question is always "How fast is it?" (Where "fast" means raw CPU clock speed.)
I've certainly had no problems with my Athlon 600. My Cyrix "166" occasionally had an iffy, but defintely kicked a Pentum 133's butt. Going back a ways, the NEC V20 wasn't that much faster than an 8088, but really improved disk transfers and graphics.
AMD's numbering is stupid, but so's it Intel's raw clock speed.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I just received my new Athlon 1800+ XP from UPS :) Screw Intel if they can't just put out a good product at a good price. This just makes me that much more glad I bought an Athlon.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Just look at what they did for Cyrix!
Oh... erm... wait a minute...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Actually ESC K7S5A is a pretty lousy board.
Decent K7 board like Epox 8KHA+ is going to cost you about a 100$.
And don't buy motherboards without warranty. If you get a motherboard from the web and it brakes, don't expect manufecturer to replace it. Most of motherboard manufacturers have warranty agreements with recellers not users.
But I digressed.
So you buy 100$ mobo for K7 and 100$ mobo for P4. You buy 120$ XP1700+ and 135$ P4 1.6A.
You clock your XP1700+ to XP2000+ (which doesn't always work), and you clock 1.6A to 2.2A (which almoust always works).
Now the price of the systems is almoust identical but 1.6A clocked to 2.2A runs cooler and faster.
Who do you choose?
It used to be that K7 systems have an edge against P4s but not anymore. The only thing that's left in K7s favour is mature DDR chipset IMHO, but Intel will catch up soon. But then, there's Hammer coming down the road. Very interesting time.
Intel is very competitive, do not forget it. They wouldn't be in this business otherwise
Boy does Intel ever look like they're grasping at straws here. They funded a study which said basically that AMD's model-number game is kinda dumb. WE ALL KNEW THAT, GUYS, THANKS!
Then they went on to flat-out say, that, yes, they have pretty bad performance, but they sure have bigger numbers, so we should be paying attention to that instead. I've seen lots of companies treating their customers as if they
didn't have the intelligence of rocks, but this is the first time I've seen a company actually asking its customers to be stupid.
The best part of the article was the last two paragraphs, though:
Dunford actually flatly contradicted himself without even taking a breath! That's the most blatantly two-faced thing I've seen in the world of marketing for a really long time.
Off-topic, though--when I tried posting this as text, it would preview it just fine, but when I told it that it was HTML formatted, it complained incessantly that I had too many junk characters. Perhaps it doesn't like quotation marks or something? Why doesn't this activate with the standard Slashdot spelling of its?
Of course it is no surprise when you have headlines like
since most consumers have a clue that there might be some bias in such claims.But I have to really wonder about the mentality of Intel executives that approved of paying money to Aberdeen "get an independent outside assessment to say that our competitor's products suck."
Not to mention that Aberdeen's reputation as "an independent outside assessment source" has been pretty well sullied by this whole snafu. If they didn't make a lot of money from Intel on this story, then they made a bad business decision.
Intel can't hope to help its reputation among knowledgeable IT people with this kind of a move. Meanwhile, the more gullible and dupable market won't read this report because they don't really care to see "so much technical detail". Besides, the g&d market is already sold on MegaHurts as the The One Number of Comparison.
Initially I had figured it was like political mudslinging ads, but the more I look at this one it seems to be a case where the mud slinger is ending up coated with more mud than the slingee.
Intel needs someone with more common sense to be put in charge of their public relations.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Via HardOCP: 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.
You think AMD would say "we put out that number to show how fast this is in relation to Intel's chips"? Of course not. This is a MARKETING GIMMICK, plain and simple, and if it refers to AMD's own internal numbers on their own chips, or directly toward Intel's offerings, it really makes no difference. The numbers aren't that far off, Intel advertises *clock speed* (too bad the Intel chips don't execute a full instruction per clock), AMD advertises some performance number based on a benchmark, what's the difference? They're both full of shit.
I say they publish MIPS/MFLOPS, but that's probably more technical than most people would be interested in. Some of the benchmarks actually show this, I think the AMD has about the same MIPS/MFLOPS scores in core x86, the Intel MIPS score is a little higher but its MFLOPS score is a little lower and I think that's where the balance comes out (although both of these CPU's would probably advertise MIPS/MFLOPS using their proprietary instruction sets instead of core x86 instructions).
Big bad Intel for paying for this report, we should be happy to have a choice between CPU vendors. MS uses much more active methods to beat their competition (not that this crowd loves MS) but I don't see the masses whining their way into writing a check at the local CompUSA for a boxed Linux distro (the XP/2K hating crowd around here is a small group I'd bet). So if you think the masses don't give a shit about this little Intel/AMD debacle, cha-ching you're right. Dell and Gateway will still keep selling cheap Intel systems and up-charging for AMD's from guys interested enough to request one but who don't have the balls to build one themselves, Intel will maintain their market share and AMD price cuts will still keep Intel chips a hell of a lot cheaper than they were when Cyrix was around.
for example somone could buid a core with a internal clock reducer (like the FPU in VIAs Winchip cum CIII), so even though a chip for all intensive purposes hase a external clock of 2ghz, if it has a reducer isnide that knocks it in half (like the CIII FPU), its really running a 1ghz. Now if AMD did this with a internal 1/4 reducer they could match the Intel clock & performance wise, would you be happy then.
Or one could build a chip with a long pipeline, so when it runs at 2ghz it performs like a 1ghz chip
I argue that MHz aren't all that objective any more. The Pentium 4's "400MHz front-size bus" actually runs at 100MHz with 4 data bursts per clock cycle, and (conversely) internally parts of the P4 run at double the reported clockspeed. I think MHz are turning out to be about as relevant and objective as the console "bit wars" of the 90s, where manufacturers just announced the size of the fatest pipe in the system.
Jeremy
Your comments are speculation at best.
OTOH, the other fellow seems to be a real end user of the program (or class of programs) in question. Any benchmark needs to reflect real world use. A glorified version of Norton SI simply isn't useful.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Time and again AMD's superior CPUs get paired up with crappy VIA chipsets. AMD did make a half-assed attempt to make their own chipset but more often than not their Northbridge would be paired with a VIA Southbridge by manufacturers.
Hopefully NForce is going to change all that, but from what I understand the prudent geek is going to have to wait for the next rev of the current crop of motherboards for that chipset to really bear fruit. It would be even better if AMD would get back into the business of making their own chipsets tailored precisely to their CPUs but that might be asking too much.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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
Come on, the PIII serial number panic was largely FUD. Workstations have had software-accessible serial numbers on their motherboards for ages. Run 'uname -m' on an IBM RS/6000 - there's the CPU serial number. Even for CPUs that don't have IDs, most high-class machines come with built-in Ethernet, so you can treat the PROM's MAC address as a serial number for the motherboard.
What were your objections to the PIII serial number, again? Did you listen to the trade rag "journalists" who said your web browser would use it as a unique ID to track your movements across the web? Why, pray tell, couldn't your web browser just use your Ethernet address for this purpose? Or, failing that - what about your hard disk serial number? (You do have a hard disk, right? If so, it has a 32-bit serial number.)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
1. the amd rating is a ploy. period. neccessary...but still a ploy.
2. intel's mhz strategy is a ploy too.
3. amd's chips currently, dollar for dollar, mhz for mhz perform better then intels. period.
4. the comments about lightwave are all fucked up. toms hardware does not know shit about lightwave. they run a render of ONE SCENE THAT USES RADIOSITY (used less then 1% of the time in ANIMATION BECAUSE IT'S TOO SLOW)...and oh radiosity has been optimized for P4. I've used p4's from Dell, and Athlon's from XI...for 90% of day to day use in Lightwave, the Athlon's are faster. period.
Anyone looking for a nice workstation and is uninformed will see Tom's benchmarks and think
"ohhhh Intel is the way to go!!!"
soooo wrong. go with a P4...and you spend more and get less.
I might as well find the one photoshop plugin that flies with a P4...base my entire Image Editing review on that one plugin...and proclaim that the P4 "has the edge".
not.
For the record, hard drive serial numbers are rather trivial to change.
And an awful lot of equipment nowadays either allows dynamic MAC changing, or ways to spoof it.
How exactly can you change a hard wired CPU serial number?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Granted.
AFAIK you generally can't change the boot-time MAC address, only the address(es) your card listens to when it runs.
(Of course, this is often good enough. I recently had an episode with a software package from PTC - they sent me a license generated from the wrong host ID. To verify that the software itself worked, I changed the MAC address of the machine. Sure enough, that fooled the license manager. This was on HP-UX.)
By not giving access to it. I believe the specific CPUID level that gets the PSN can be made privileged, so only the OS kernel can read it.
If you have an OS kernel that will conspire with your web browser to use your ID to track you and "destroy your privacy" ... then you have bigger problems than a PIII serial number. Because that same OS could just as well use your original MAC address, or your hard disk serial number, and store it in some other location - we'll call this location a "registry" - and henceforth it doesn't matter what you change. For that matter, the same browser, in collusion with the OS (for the purpose of argument we'll say the browser is "part of the OS"), can just as well use a unique registration number which was printed on your OS install media and which you typed in during the installation.
Not that any company would ever produce such an OS or such a browser, of course, but work with me here. And if you had no way of independently verifying the workings of said browser - say, if it were closed-source - then worrying about the effects of a mere PSN would be rather absurd. Much like driving a car off a bridge into a lake and worrying whether your paint is sufficiently rust-proof.
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
RedHat makes money off of stuff you may have worked on, I don't know. but then again, you did put it under the GPL. So i guess you didnt' really want to make much off of it anyways. Conclusion: you are retarded, RedHat is just fine.
Actually i was speaking of that other software company we talk about. The one that relies on their old reputation, sweet OEM deals, their current market share, a hefty ad budget (including some great FUD writers + lawyers) etc to stay on top.
Who is this Anonymous Coward character, how does he post so much, and why is he always such a whore?