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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.
Well, it would be interesting to see them succeed, but I don't see it happening. Exactly what damages are they claiming?
-- If it ain't broke - overclock it more.
AMD's PR rating is a measure of comparative efficiancy -- The projected MHz as compared to (IIRC) either an Intel Pentium 3. Or was it a T-Bird.
Whatever it was, the rating means, a chip of the older architecture would have to be at or above the rating MHz (2100+ in your case) to give the same performance.
It's actually a decent representation of performance, unlike the Intel higher clock speed but lower bandwidth.
One has to wonder wether we would have moved on to asyncronous computing by now, at least inside the core, if marketing didn't need to push the clock speed.
We've already seen that this silly chase for faster clocks has caused certain processor makers to abandon computational efficiency in favor of getting to 3ghz as soon as possible. What other engineering breakthroughs have we missed out on because we're too obsessed with fast clocks?
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Preview should do a spell check. It can't possibly be more then 30 or so lines of code. Highlight the potential misspellings, and provide a list of suggestions below the comment. They wouldn't even have to do the hard part, since there are great scriptable spell checkers already available for free. I'm tired of cutting and pasting my posts through ispell
Just recently I had a neighbor hire me to do a concept animation of a machine he was going to build. I used truespace 5.2. It was insanely detailed down to individual links on the bicycle
chain drive.
The poly count got so high that my P4 was going to take 3 days to render it. My computer could hardly handle moving around in the scene anymore. I told the neighbor I had brought the scene as far as it could go on my P4
and I couldn't go any further without a new machine. He gave me $2500 to work with so this was what I built.
Dual Xeon P4 2.0ghz
1 Gig RDRAM
Maxtor 80gig IDE drive
DVD-R(by his request)
The system definetly cut the rendering time down, to 24 hours,but something just didn't feel right about the new render time. I could
have bought 2 more p4 1.4ghz and accomplished the same for less. What really got me was when my friend rendered the scene on his single athalonMP 2200.
14 hours
A single athalonMP 2200 was smokin my dual xeon setup! Well, this is all it took for me to write off intel forever. Intel fuck you and your shitty CPU's, you've lost my trust forever!
Anyone that is even considering using a Intel solution as a renderstation, please don't waste the money. You can do a lot more with a lot less using AMD.
Well to some degree. The Chip makers are playing the numbers game we all know it. They will try to tell the consumer that 1.6 GHz is better than 1 GHz because there is a 600 MHz advantage. Most NEW computer buyers don't even know what a Hertz is besides a rental car company! The little companies are a bit pissed because the "Big Guys" are winning the money from ignorant consumers by making them believe only the numbers matter not the applications or even the OS!
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
At the time the P4 came out, AMD's Athlon processors were SMOKING Intel, and that is Intel's fault, they certainly could employ enough engineers to destroy AMD. Fact is, they got lazy. Previously AMD processors hadnt been as stable as Intel and they could still sell on that point but to AMD's credit by the time the Athlon came out it was a stable platform (still had a couple minor issues). And Intel was worried.
... Anyways, this is really like putting more tires on your car. It SOUNDS like more, but you ain't goin any faster, the fact is that 4 execution units and 4 wheels is about as many as people will ever need. The problem is, that it becomes impossible to schedule instructions for 8 units, having 8 instruction units is essentially saying, your code should have 8 seperate threads [using the term threads loosely] that dont depend on eachother to avoid interlocks ... *IMPOSSIBLE*. 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.
What Intel has been doing to make chips faster ever since the 486 has been adding more execution units. The 386 had 1 execution unit, 486 had two, PII and PIII had 4, and I *think* the P4 had 8 units?
Why did Intel do this? They were scared because AMD beat them at their own game. Intels self esteem was damaged -- So they launched an agressive marketing campaign, and used these tactics to maniupulate the marketing metric, MHZ. Ceartinly sleazy.
You'll notice now that Intels best P4 is faster then AMD's best part right now -- they've backed off the agressive advertising. However, they burned enough geek karma that I'll never buy intel again.
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.
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Remember, how 'fast' you can browse the web has more to do with the efficiency of your web browser and your bandwidth and very much less to do with your processor and your operating system. To say that browsers under Windows 2000 render wab pages faster than browsers under OS X is quite possibly true depending on what browser you are using. But that doesn't say shit about how fast your hardware is. I would bet you that my OS X machine 'browses the web' using lynx faster than your Win2k machine does using Netscape. Does that man that my Mac is faster then your PC? No. It means that my web browser is faster and more efficient than yours. And shall we not get into the relative differences between the way OS X and Win2k draw the screen? X is harder on system resources and takes more processing power to accomplish similar tasks (drawing windows, moving windows, etc). This says nothing about how fast the processor is, only that OS X is hard on resources.
The next time you want to compare processor speed between platforms try and pick a good benchmark. The seti@home client is probably a good benchmark, rendering graphics or video is probably a good benchmark, integer or floating point tests are probably good benchmarks, Q3 is probably a good benchmark. Rendering web pages is probably not a good benchmark because it isn't dependent on processor speed so much as it is on rendering engine efficiency - that's why IE and Opera and Mozilla on identical systems will render identical pages in different times. Some browsers are faster than others, even on identical hardware. This says nothing about the speed of your hardware.
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
If they /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.
I agree. I think the claim is more pointed at the claims about being better than their previous processors, not on Mhz. I mean, a P-4 2.2 Ghz runs at 2.2 Ghz, but it doesn't perform X percent better than a P-III.
I read some reports when the P-4 first came out that for office applications, a P-II 400Mhz was faster than a 1.5 Ghz p-4. They cut off the Level 1 cache, and they use Level2 closely coupled cache cause it cuts costs. Despite the fact that the 8K of L-1 cache they left behind could be overflowed by one horizontal line on a screen at 1024X768.
But basically, Intel has won both the Mhz war and the marketing war. Think of it this way - what's their target audience? Certainly not people who research before they buy a computer with a certain processor. If it tells you anything about the target demographic, the Intel Pentium Four is the P-4 and not the P-IV because they felt that not enough people would know what IV ment, and would call it the Pentium EyeVee.
So, for their target audience, they nailed it.
~Will
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