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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.
... a class action suite against Microsoft because WindowsXP isnt any better ExPerience than any other version of Windows.
:)
Seriously though...
WTF? So AMD doesn't even use Mhz rating anymore so they get away with saying 'mines's is better?'
But guess what? the P4 DOES bench faster on some benchmarks than the p3 and Athlon, likewise, the p3 does better in a few, and Athlon does the best in still other things.
Anyway, its not like the processor's slowing the machine down. "It's the DRIVES, stupid!"
Lost Pride from their Ignorance. I think that's about all they can claim!
...had these people just taken a few minutes to actually learn something before they bought their computer, maybe they'd be a little brighter, a little wiser. ...but, hey...this way, they can steal money from Intel...and since I'm rooting for AMD, I'm all for that!
I mean, the Pentium 4 is shit, I think, but at least I've done my homework and I know better than to just look at the number listed before "GHz" as the basis for buying my computer...
You can bet they'll wind up settling for the usual -- $25 rebate coupons to 'affected' Pentium 4 customers applicable to the purchase of their next Pentium-based computer, and tens of millions in cash to the lawyers, with some of the cash kicked back to the plaintiffs in whose name the suit was brought.
Madison County, IL, where the suit was brought is a class-action mecca now for its jurors willingness to award anyone money for anything.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'm not an Intel fan, but as far as I see it, their claims are legitimate. They say their chips run at a certain Mhz, and that may be true, despite the fact that the performance may not be as good as a slower speed Athlon.
For example, let's get a 4cyl engine next to a 8cyl engine. You COULD redline the 4cyl at say 6000RPMS and only run the 8cyl at about 5000RPM. Most likely, the 8cyl will still perform better than the 4cyl running at 1000RPM faster. (Just an illustration, I dont know how accurate an actuall test would result)
While I don't agree that clock speed soley determines the overall performance of a computer, Intel may be telling the truth when they say they have the FASTEST CLOCKED cpu, but other claims after that may get them in trouble. Sure, their P4 runs at 2.2 or whatever the max speed is now and if you were to gauge it, it'd be correct. I think this is just a case of consumers needing to be more educated in shopping for computers.
This does bring up an question. If we disreguard cpu speed as a selling point and use overal performance rating, judging computers becomes more subjective. Just changing out RAM, or chipsets, or some other small item can make a significant difference in a PC's value. More reason to build your own system.
$cat
First -- what specific, bogus claims has Intel made about P4 performance? A literalist might suggest that Intel claims that P4's help game performance in alien spacecraft, but that's a little hard to falsify, as far as I know, and probably wouldn't fly (unless, say, the plaintiffs include a bona fide literally minded extra-terrestial of the Roswellus anthroabductus variety).
/might/ be considered puffery as it's a fairly vapid claim (does "the internet" include, say, running the Flash / Shockwave / Java applets that abound online?).
/have/ been making specific, non-puffery, bogus claims however, then I wouldn't mind seeing them smacked around for it, so long as the same reasoning gets applied in other cases as well.
Second -- it's a generally established principle ("puffery") that commercials are allowed to exaggerate to some degree. Chevy can claim that their vehicles are tough, "like a rock", which is a far less specific claim than, say, "this product is so tough that it can be driven two hundred thousand miles without maintenance" or "its windows will withstand sustained 9x19mm fire: perfect for the urban gangland outing". "Making the internet run faster"
If they
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
It is slower on certain tests, but more importantly, it is slower per Mhz than the P3, the P3 gets you more bang for each cycle in almost all applications. It's like Intel coming out with the Pentium 60, and then later on coming out with a 133 Mhz 486 and calling it the Pentium II, as far as net effects go.
(a 486 133 is faster than a Pentium 60)
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
While most Slashdot readers see through computer marketing hype, the average person (you know, the other 99%) doesn't have the time or the inclination to do real research on every PC component they purchase. Is that Intel's fault? No. Is it Intel's moral responsibility to at the very least not imply that a 1.8GHz P4 isn't faster than a 1.6GHz Athlon, or a 1.4GHz P3 Tualatin? Yes.
How many advertisements from the companies in question had lines like, "Tired of that old 1GHz PC? Get the latest 1.5GHz screamer!"
I believe that the primary complaint was that people were being misled into thinking that, say, a 1.6GHz P4 system is 60% faster than a 1GHz Athlon or P3, which is definitely not the case unless the only application the system runs is Q3, or a few of the rather limited number that the P4 runs very well. While I don't believe any vendor really explicitly stated anything similar to "a 2.0GHz system is necessarily twice as fast as a 1.0GHz system!", the companies did imply such a conclusion by comparing clockspeeds (without coming to any conclusion except the higher clockspeed is fast, though not saying "faster") or by using ads with lines that implied the same.
One can be misleading without blatantly lying.
Whether the companies in question were just unethical or did something illegal is the question. I would hazard a guess that the lawsuit has no strong legal grounds.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Nah - I don't think Intel "deserves to be sued" over this minor issue. Why? Because frankly, all of these frivilous lawsuits tie up our courts and jack up the prices that it costs for an individual to get a decent lawyer when a real need arises.
People have always paid more for Intel CPUs, just as they pay more for many other "name brand" items. If you were to legally pursue every well-known company that produced an item that cost more, yet had inferior quality to competing brands - you'd be in court with just about everyone.
It's *always* up to the buyer to do his/her research. If he/she still decides they prefer Intel just because they like knowing their chip is backed by the largest CPU maker in the world - so be it.
(And anyway, there's more to it than Mhz. Some people, like myself, went with a P4 because we preferred the overall options and quality of the motherboards. AMD had problems getting the "tier 1" motherboard makers to build boards for their CPUs for quite a while.)
Actually, that $0.34 won't get it on a plane (unless to Hawaii or Alaska, --and foreign embassys-- when the USPS actually looses money getting your mail there), but point taken. The USPS does provide a good service, at a damn decent rate. If timothy ever bothered to actually talk to a USPS officer, he might gather that, yes, most of them are quite competant, and curteous. That only leaves the point about their speed. Yeah, they may be a bit slow by modern standards (electronics, telephones, etc make this world such a small place), but for an agency that moves millions of tons of mail a day, they do a damn good job, IMHO.
If Timothy thinks he can give the USPS some pointers to increace efficency, decrease costs, and make sure every 'friggin USPS employee has mile wide grin on their face at all times, then I'm sure that the USPS would just love to hear from him! Hell, who knows, maybe he could volunteer some time or something...
This is software dependant. I think it is Lightwave that is clearly faster on the P4s due to it having been specifically optimized for the P4.
As always, benchmark on your application. Weigh price vs performance, then buy.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
Compare that to the specs of a car, the engine and HP does not always determine the speed of the vehicle.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
In latin, Let the buyer beware. It's also a central principle in common law. Courts have recognized since the Romans that the buyer has a responsiblity to ask the right questions. The courts can only intervene where there is a blatent attempt to decieve.
This is just like automakers marketing SUV's as safer than sedans [when hitting a wall straight on]. Sure they are safer when you hit a wall straight on. Now, rolling over, tire blowouts, and repair costs, they are not included in the benchmark. Nor is fuel economy.
But as a bonus, you can get one of those funny propellers for the tow hitch, and 0% financing...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I have a 2.4 ghz P4 with 533 mhz rambus and 512 mb 1066 DDR ram.
My older machine is a P3 650 mhz with 512 mb SDRAM.
The P4 is at least 2-3 times faster when I load windows and applications.
There are a few things to consider in addition to the processor speed.
First, the speed of the memory bus is important. That determines how fast it can move around pages of memory. If Rambus hadn't tried to screw everyone then Intel wouldn't have had to scale back the memory bus speed in the P4s by bringing back SDRAM. As a result, using a motherboard with SDRAM slows down the P4.
Second, the amount of memory hasn't improved much. The P4 boards have the same number of RAM slots as the P3 boards did. If you have a lot of programs open or a huge 600 mb file, then 512 mb on a P4 will feel like a Pentium Pro when it starts having to use the hard drive for swap space.
Third, check your hard drive bus speed. Is it a 66 or 100? Mine is older than that and i'm sure I takes a performance hit.
This is going to take a long time to get through court, and there's a good question as to whether the non-scientific minds who will be perusing the case will make the right decision, but Intel is in the moral right.
Intel didn't design the chip just so that it would have a higher clock frequency and therefore mislead people into thinking their chips were faster. They came up with a whole new processing architecture, that simultaneously created a large efficiency drop in instructions processed per clock cycle but allowed for much higher frequency operation. The end result was faster processors, but the clock frequencies didn't correspond. Not their fault.
Further, end users should have been used to the idea that clock speed and processing speed didn't correspond; AMD's processors had been outperforming pre-P4 processors, clock cycle for clock cycle, for a while. AMD didn't start their "processor equivalent" labeling scheme 'til the P4s came on the market, though.
If you've ever witnessed a Pentium 166 box rendering a complex website, you'll know what those marketing guys were getting at.
I have a 486-50 laptop and have occasionally used it to browse the web away from home. It barely works with Opera, and is impossible with IE.
You can connect as fat a pipe as you want to the machine, for fat Flash-infested web pages, a Pentium 4 does give you quicker access.
Fast does not always translate directly to 'bandwidth.'
It's just another sign of geek politics that everybody chooses to make these marketing claims into jokes rather than acknowledge they know what they mean.
What they actually said was 100% accurate -- that the new processors run at a higher clock speed. This might mislead people who don't realize that clock speed and processing speed are not identical, but I don't think that's Intel's fault. Take for example cars -- you regularly hear car manufacturers talk about a car with "260 hp" and advertise on that basis. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will understand that a car with 260 hp is not necessarily twice as fast (either in top speed or acceleration) than a car with 130 hp. But your average person who doesn't know anything about cars might be mislead into thinking that. But I don't see anyone suing car manufacturers.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Second of all, intel stretched their pipeline to 40+ stages, this means that the penalty for pipeline stall, branch perdiction miss, context switch, etc is *HUGE*. AMD's Athlon pipeline was a lean 7 stages.
Nicely confabulated! When making stuff up to prove a point, you might as well go for the jugular. The pipeline lengths in question are 20 and 10, not 40 and 7. Incidentally, a long pipeline has nearly nothing to do with "context switch", at least as that term is commonly used (i.e., switching from one process context to another). Any pipeline issues caused by a context switch are dwarfed a thousand times over by cache and TLB issues.
Aside: what is with the short pipeline fetishism on the part of AMD partisans? You guys realize that they had four- and fiv-stage implementations of MIPS CPUs back in the early '80's, right? Imagine how brilliantly fast a MIPS r2000 would be in 3.0GHz! Oh, wait, you can't make an r2000 run at that clock speed. Hmm. Maybe pipeline length is just one parameter in a complicated design space, and we should look on manufacturer variations as differing technical solutions. After all, that's how we treat cache design, functional unit choices, and myriad other microarchitectural parameters.
No, that sounds complicated. It must be an Intel conspiracy to corrupt our precious bodily fluids...
Why did Intel do this? They were scared because AMD beat them at their own game.
Then in a few sentences, you say:
You'll notice now that Intels best P4 is faster then AMD's best part right now...
Umm, so how was Intel "beaten at its own game"? A bit of history, for perspective.
The Pentium III is the same core that was originally sold as the Pentium Pro. That core was introduced in 1995, and Intel is still squeezing performance out of it. At the beginning of the PPro's lifetime, it was an extremely ambitious design for the physical processes then available; people called it a too-hot, too-big, too-transistor-intensive monstrosity that would never be practical. Towards the middle of its life, in the years '97 to 2000 or so, the PIII was nicely matched to the physical parameters of then-current fab technology, and Intel produced modest shrinks and speed bumps seemingly at will. Those were the salad years of the PIII. Now physical technology has moved further down the road, and the PPro core is showing its age. It's leaving performance on the table that could be scooped up with transistor-intensive techniques like trace caches, more functional units, issue width, etc.
Like almost every other design generation of every CPU, ever, the P4 has a more complicated pipeline than its predecssors. Just as in 1995, the first year showed pretty "meh" performance, with much armchair punditry claiming that it's a monstrosity. Now, about 18 months after its introduction, the P4 is scaling well. AMD, on the other hand, is struggling to wring a few more modest speed bumps out of the K7 before it limps along to the end of its design life. The AMD partisans hold out hope for the K8, generally forgetting that the K8 is a K7 with a 64-bit bag on the side.
It saddens me to type this on my Athlon, but there's a strong likelihood that AMD's years in the sun are over. Five years hence, we might be looking back at the years 1999-2001 as a lost golden age of competition in the x86 CPU space.
To remedy the situation, processors ratings need to be measured in IPC*MHZ [instructions per cycle] for both integer and floating point operations. Then it would be pretty clear to consumers what was going on.
Any simple attempt at measuring performance will end up being simplistic. The big problem with your proposal can be summed up as: which instructions? NOPs? SIMD floating point? The instructions that make up Quake III, or gcc, or my LISP stock market prediction application? What about when the instruction sets of the CPUs differ, ala SSE2? Performance characterization really is difficult; anybody who claims otherwise is trying to sell you something.
I find comments like this rather interesting.
Absolutely NO ONE would have ever considered the consequences of ripping a heatsink off the processor if it hadn't been for that ridiculous Tom's Hardware video where they did just that (hint to the general readership: Tom measured the P4 at a constant 29C, the overheat protection circuitry on a P4 kicks in somewhere south of 60C... do you see a problem with his results?).
Heatsinks do NOT fall off, or if they do, your processor burning up is probably the least of your worries as compared to, for example, the severe physical thrashing that your computer case is receiving to cause that heatsink to fall off.
If the fan fails, any processor will shut the system down, either by using the RPM detection circuitry built into all modern motherboards, or by using the temperature sensors in the motherboards. Sure, the P4 could keep running without a fan, though if it's not throwing an obvious error message, this might actually be worse then completely shutting down. Why? Because then you've got a server running at 50% (or less) of it's normal performance for no immediately obvious reason. And besides, since we're talking x86, we're not looking at high-reliability servers here (if you're looking to build high-reliabiity servers with x86 equipment, you NEED completely redundant systems anyway), so I'm not real sure how big of an advantage this sort of thing would give you anyway.
Both the P4 and the Athlon are good chips in their own right, and while I do applaud Intel's improved thermal protection circuitry, this isn't exactly what I'd call a really important feature. At best it's good idiot protection in my mind. It's strongest point is to prevent people from frying a chip by improperly installing a heatsink in the first place, which is NOT hard to do unless you're a.) REALLY lazy or b.) not very smart.