Intel, OEMs Face Lawsuit For Megahertz Marketing

prostoalex writes "A group of PC owners filed a lawsuit against Intel, Gateway and HP, stating that companies spread misleading information about Pentium 4 processor performing faster than Pentium 3 or Athlon. The complaint alleges that 'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.' PC World has more details in its story." I wonder if the same litigants have a suit against the USPS for ads leading one to expect prompt service from courteous, competent employees.

Comments

Great

[Anonymous Coward]

These people are 100% right. The early pentium 4's at 1.4 1.5 and 1.6 MHzs were slower then the Pentium III's at 1.0, 1.13 and 1.2 Mhzs at certains tasks mainly running office apps. and number intensive programs because of the architecture of the FPU on the P4 and several other reasons. ALL P4's are slower than Athlons at the same clock speed, and Intel blatantly lies about this. All you have to do is run some benchmarks to prove this. Now if the P4 cost less than the Athlon it would be okay, but the P4 is more expensive. So intel is useing its reputation to screw uneducated consumers into buying more expensive and slower processors. They deserve to be sued. My only problem with this lawsuit is that EVERYONE knows all this already, so if you are stupid enough to buy a P4 you deserve to be screwed.

Benchmarking: Intel vs. AMD

[glh]

The complaint alleges that "the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon."

The article later states that benchmarks would be more reliable. However, I've seen some benchmarks saying that the Athlon is a lot slower than the P4 (at least on Tom's Hardware).. Of course, this is comparing the P4 2400 vs. the Athlon XP 2100. Article here.

Tom's hardware mentions that you still get more processer power for your money, but it concludes that Intel is faster (at least in this comparison).

I doth quote:
"In the last "AMD vs. Intel" comparison, the Athlon XP 2100+ took the leading position by a nose, but now, the Pentium 4/2400 easily overtakes its arch rival. Meanwhile, you should keep in mind that that the P4 has a 666 MHz core clock advantage over the Athlon XP. "

So "whats up" with this article? Did the plaintiffs read this before they filed the lawsuit?? Is Tom's Hardware just another victim of the megahertz marketing machine? (Actually, the tests would seem to indicate no). By the way, I'd love to see the plantiffs win, because I get really sick of the megahertz crap that they ramrod down everyones throat. Not to mention, any computer illiterate person knows that "Intel is better" because of this.

At any rate, I don't really think benchmarks are the answer- everyone knows you can make a benchmark say whatever you want (see for instance the Pet Shop application debate w/ Java vs. .NET)

Re:Benchmarking: Intel vs. AMD

[BrookHarty]

Looking at Toms Hardware chart, Rating a AMD 2400+ vs a Intel 2.4ghz, the AMD is faster in almost all benchmarks. Tom messed up when he compared a 2100+ vs a 2400. AMD's system shows that its processor is faster at its rating level than Intel ghz rating . Even Toms Benchmarks show this.

Thou, I do like the number of benchmarks Tom uses, lame, quake, scisoft sandra, pcmark, sysmark, specview, (I wish he would use madonion also).. But trying not to repeat a few posts, when an application is compiled towards the cpu, it will be faster. Look at Flaskmpg, AMD compiled version showed an incredible speed up. Same with GCC 3.2 (check the changes), they said an average of 8.7 (with 2.6 or something from 2.95) so thats around a 11+ percent increase, Average! 3DNOW or SSE2 Optimzation really makes a big difference on bechmarks, programs should support both.

Cant wait to see what happens when AMD starts its 3000+ chips, and the 64bit hammer comes out. :)

Re:It's true even on the P4 Xeon level.

[killraven]

Who (as in retailers) in their right mind is going to let me install the compiler of my choice (assuming that I am not breaking my license by using it on more than one box...), compile my CFD models, and let them run for a couple of days on a computer I *might* buy?

Nobody, that's who.

Have you asked? Sure your local PC store might not, but I've gotten to borrow machines from HP, Fujitsu Siemens, sgi and a couple of local box shops in the past. And I was working for a tiny company buying maybe 3-5 high end workstation at a time. If you can convince them that you are seriously considering throwing money their way, you'd be surprised how far they might go.

Re:It's true even on the P4 Xeon level.

[Bishop]

Believe it or not I have done this with 3D MAX. I was assisting a 3D MAX user purchase a workstation. We walked into a reasonably large shop told them he had 3k to burn and asked them what systems they had that we could easily setup to test. The first 2 shops said "no." The third was smarter and he bought a dual Xeon with gobs of ram, and a rediculous 21" monitor. (I suspect that the final bill, which I did not handle, was more than the 3k.) More importantly this shop bought repeat bussiness.

The trick is there was no "might buy." This guy was buying a system from the shop that was going to let him run some tests. It helped that the shop had a rackmount Xeon system that they were getting ready to deliver to another customer. But if they didn't we were willing to wait until they had some stuff worth testing. It was worth the shops time to install winnt, 3D MAX, and load the big models. The only caveat is that most shops won't have top of the line sitting around. Instead you have to test on the best they have and extrapolate. In your case a single test on an Athlon probably would have shown that it was top dog. Remeber that you already had a dual pent to test on.

This dosen't help you now, but next time you need a workstation consider making the sale conditional on a few tests. If you are buying a high end system you are a customer the vendor should want to work with. It is cliche: make the vendor work for the sale.