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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.
The Pentium 4 makes the Internet Run Faster !!!
- DenialX
... 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!"
When the P4 came out I had to stop and say to myself, "Self, what the hell." I understood the engineering logistics of why we had more MHz and slower actual speed, IPC, LBC, IHOP, etc. But, a side of me said Intel marketing people put on the bunny suits and hit the clean room and said hey, just give us more MHz.
But I got over it, what is wrong with these people? I smell money grubbers.
Quite frankly, AMD should step up to the plate with Intel on this and so should every other CPU maker incase this ever comes back on them. Esp. AMD with their current PR 1900+ lingo. Check out Ars's coverage of this story where you see what I have seen, the lacky sales clerk saying No no, 1900+ means 1.9 GHz, even though the sign says different.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
$75,000 x every intel PC purchased in the last year = ouch.
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
Speeds should be measured by overall system performance, not the speed of the CPU.
:)
Too wonderfully right. Nothing expressed this more to me than seeing the difference between a 1992 spec machine (33Mhz bus, 33Mhz ram, 33Mhz cpu, 33Mhz cache...etc) and a current spec machine, where every one of those (add in the drive speed and a few others here and there) are all operating at wildly different speeds. In one 2Ghz machine, how many different hertzes(!) do you have?
dana (having a horrific grammar day - but you get the idea
a grrl & her server
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.
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
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?
--
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
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.
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.
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.
Did you read the article? They are not complaining about clockspeeds...
Note to self: No more arguing with the faithful.
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.)
Running OS X, it takes about double the clock on the Mac side to equal the speed of Windows 2000 on a PC. (Thus, it takes a Mac at 1ghz to run OS X as fast as a 500mhz PIII runs Windows 2000). This is the exact opposite of Apple's claims.
It really is not fair to the consumer, especially the more novice-type users who tend to buy Macs. I recently visited my family who has two Macs, and they could not believe how fast web browsing was on my wintel laptop. Keep in mind my laptop is about 2 years old!
Are Mhz a misleading figure? Yeah. But that's because people associate higher clockspeed with higher overall speed. Intel and the rest shouldn't be held responsible for someone's own interpretation.
You're right, except they have embraced this false association and now present it in their marketing, e.g. "...with a blistering fast 2GHz Pentium 4 processor..." MHz/GHz numbers are the only thing in most ads that even come close to a performance rating, so by focusing on them as the sole performance metric, Intel and the OEMs are implying that this is a valid way to measure overall computer speed, even across platforms and/or different processor architectures.
Just because the public at large believes something, that doesn't mean those beliefs can be presented as fact in marketing materials. There just may be some merit to this case.
~Philly
Indeed. I was in NY for the first time last week. I bought a metro card for all-day travel. Unfortunately I got on to the wrong platform, so realising my mistake I left and crossed the road to enter the opposite platform. The turnstile said "just used" when I swiped the card. I asked the token-booth woman why and she said
"Didn't anyone tell you about the 18 minute rule"?
"What 18 minute rule?" I replied
"You can't use the card twice in any 18 minute period."
"No, nobody explained that, I just used the machine over there to buy one. I went onto the wrong platform. Can you let me onto the platform please?"
"No."
After a lot of arguing I thought 'fuck it' and got a taxi. On the whole I really enjoyed NYC, the only two things that pissed me off were that woman, and the fact the platforms aren't air-conditioned. It was like a furnace at the 34th Penn station.
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
You mean by how long it takes to actually get anything done? Windows ME with a 933Mhz P3 locks-up much faster than a 350Mhz P2 with Windows 98, so the Windows ME one is better! (Remember: locking-up isn't a bug, it's a feature!)
Centralization breaks the internet.
That could be an interesting precedent for this case.
Mmph! Ever actually been into a post office and tried to, say, get your change-of-address into their system? No, that don't work so good for me, either.
;)
Worked fine for me. I've gotten plenty of mail sent to my old address, and I did move across the country. Are you sure you filled out the form in the correct language?
But in all seriousness, there are certainly crappy post offices filled with workers whose sole desire is for you to go away and leave them alone. Try a different one.
The enemies of Democracy are
We should sue just about every software company for the crappy products they put out. When was th last time you were impressed with something or had it run bug-free? My PC has benn plenty fast for years now, but when will the software catch up?
For me it was KDE2. But I didn't pay for KDE. From my word processor to the OCR that came with my scanner, there is so much junk sortware it's depressing.
Mozilla 1.0 came close.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
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
The complaint alleges that "the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon."
.NET)
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.
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.
I had my address changed, and it was convenient and pleasant.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Then you read _reviews_. Pick up a copy of Computer Shopper. Or PC Magezine. Or go to Toms Hardware. Or anandtech. It shouldn't be the computer manufacturer's duty to benchmark their systems.
The Pentium 2? The Pentium 2 box held my front door open while my friends and I labored to carry the huge Pentium 3 box into the house.
Do you research every engine part and electronics component of the cars you buy? Do you inspect the materials under the plaster and wood of a new house?
Even then, ask yourself: Are there any *unreliable* but popular sources for hardware information? No?
Read a review from Tom's Hardware or C|net recently?
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
I remember way back in the 486 days, I heard a joke that still rings true today.
.... Thank you Thank you I will be here all week.
Q: What is the difference between a car sales man and a computer sales man?
A: The car sales man knows when he is lying.
tada da boom
I remember seeing this on a compaq comercial recently "and it has a Intel Pentium 4 processor for quicker access to the net". I think they are still showing the comercial.
Hacker Media
Thanks for your insightful comment on the USPS, Timothy. It will certainly help keep the conversation intelligent and on topic.
I think Timothy was just using the USPS reference as an example of something obvious. Most post offices I have used do indeed have long lines and employees who don't give a shit.
'the Pentium 4 is less powerful and slower than the Pentium III and/or the AMD Athlon.'
This is the relevant example, but it is probably only obvious to a smaller crowd - those of us that are actually interested in the processor speed wars. Timothy's point was probably that people who chose the P4 should have known what they were getting into, hence the comparison with the USPTO. Personally, I would have written the blurb differently, though.
A dingo ate my sig...
Um....wow. You mean to say that Intel's 2.53 Ghz chip "edged" past AMD's 1.75 Ghz chip (that's only marketed to beat an Intel 2.1 Ghz chip) --- real impressive there guys...thanks for pointing out how quickly that gap is closing.
???
--noah
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
>>Plus the P4 is engineered well enough that it doesn't go *POOF* when the heatsink is removed.
To be fair, AMD acted well on this issue and inclues a temperature probe in their chips. It's still up to the MB to read it and turn off/down (I don't know which) the power, which only two have done so far. But any new MB introduced now will have to have it to become AMD certified.
they're about as fast as an Athlon XP 2000+. Pity they're also about twice as expensive.
Those athlons really rock!
It is common to hire an inspector when buying a house. I suppose that might not hold for "new" houses, but the "new" house market does not dominate the general house market. So in general, most people *do* hire a professional to inspect the house, and part of that inspection examines the house's construction and past care. For instance, signs of rotting are likely to be found.
-Paul Komarek
I now am typing this on a p4 1.8, and am quite happy with the performance, and stabillity with the intel chipset. Had Via solved the PCI bus bottleneck problem they were wrestling with, I would have gone with AMD. No dice, though.
This is much faster than my P3 800, (and light years ahead of my p1 225) so I'm fine and happy with my purchase.
Haven't you heard of metro cards? I haven't used tokens in years. $63 a month for unlimited subway and limited bus travel is pretty good.
All you have to do is run some benchmarks to prove [that the Athlon is faster clock for clock than the P4].
In that case, Microsoft SQL and Oracle are infinitely slower than MySQL and PostgreSQL because I can't even get past the stupid EULAs that make me promise I won't release benchmark results to the general public. Watch for Intel to start pulling the same sh*t when the AMD Opteron trounces both the Pentium 5 and the Itanic.
Will I retire or break 10K?
(* The Pentium 4 makes the Internet Run Faster !!! *)
I remember a 6-year-old kid in my neighborhood who used to think that "cool stickers" made bikes and cars run faster.
I bet he is purchasing a P4 right now based on such an ad.
(However, he is probably also a successful PHB because he thinks like the CEO.)
Table-ized A.I.
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.
there's a form of lobbying, microsoft and others (oil companiaes) use it, it's called astro-turfing, aka artificial grass roots campaigns. they bring in a group of people they've selected, show them certian propaganda, and then supply them with a cubicle, phone, and phone number of the senator most crucial to changing/stopping somthing.
this sounds suspiciously like AMD is astro turfing (or a variation, involving filing lawsuit rather than calling your local congressman) some bad PR for intel to me...
moox. for a new generation.
revs and horse-power if you use the car engine analogy. Just because it can get higher cycles per second doesn't mean it does "useful" work. In fact, thermodynamically speaking, you can probably measure the efficiency of a chip by its heat dissipation.
Yeah, but clock speed efficiency (IPC) in computers is meaningless -- and nobody cares about it.
According to SPECint the fastest CPU right now is Pentium 4 @ 2.53 GHz, and the second fastest is McKinley (aka Itanium 2) @ only 1 GHz. They are roughly equivalent in speed, but by IPC McKinley is much better. But so what? You can't run McKinley any faster than 1 GHz, and you can run a Pentium 4 at 2.53 GHz, so why even make the comparison?
At work, I can rip a CD with CDex in about 16-18 minutes per disk using the SSE enabled Lame encoder. On my laptop at home, it takes less than 5 minutes to rip a CD with iTunes. What gives?
How much of that is the physical speed of the CD-ROM drive? My PlexWriter 12/10/32A burner reads data at 10x to 32x (CAV) but reads audio at 10x across the whole CD, limiting me to an 8-minute rip.
But still, I've never understood how people can just rip and encode to MP3 simultaneously. Without an intermediate step where the recording exists as a wav file, there's no chance to fix up pops in the audio, silence explicit language for a play-in-front-of-your-parents edit (I'd rather not pay twice for the clean and dirty versions), or remove leading or trailing silence.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The headline was "A group of PC owners filed a lawsui..."
It should be "A pair of lawyers engaged in extortion...: Of course, that is so common that it doesn't need a headline.
No, this isn't meant to be a troll. Most people don't realize that "a class action suit filed on behalf of X million..." usually results in tiny rewards for those million (or no reward) while it results in vast sums for the lawyers who file the suit. Furthermore, because of the absurd state of US tort law - especially in some tort friendly states - Texas and Louisiana.
Note that the complaint claims that the total aware will be no more than $75,000. Of course, this does not include lawyers fees! My guess is that the lawyers put this in so that a court will find it easier to give them a win, or so that the companies will settle.
Once that is done, the real fun will begin. Having already either lost one of these cases, or settled one, the companies will then be attacked in Texas or Louisiana or another state where the tort lawyers routine win obscene settlements. They will cite the previous attack, and pocket zillions of bucks in the resulting easy win.
What will PC owners get? Probably discount certificates allowing them to buy a new processor from the defendant at a lower cost. This is how a typical american class action consumer lawsuit works!
Note that none of this has anything to do with the merits of the case. Personally, I think the case has no merit. The companies didn't lie(although AMD *does* act in a more deceptive matter - did you know that an AMD Athlon 1700+ does NOT have a clock speed near 1700 Mhz?). The consumers weren't deceived, unless they fooled themselves!
The only good weather is bad weather.
I really don't care who wrote it, but whomever did so didn't do it for/on a NeXT. That was my point.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
MGhz for Mghz a RISC chip kicked the shit out of CISC and stole their lunch money. If I'm not mistaken, they still do.
Not especially. Modern CISC CPUs such as the Athlon, the P4, and the Crusoe recompile CISC bytecode into RISC micro-operations internally. The problem with the P4 is that the decoder isn't fast enough (one micro-op per clock for non-cached instructions; three micro-ops per clock for cached instructions) to feed the P4's nine functional units.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
A brit friend of mine was sending a package back home (from the southeast US to New Castle, England) and I overheard the teller at the USPS state that overnight service would take three days. What is that if not false advertising?
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
One more note is that whether people should research their purchases or not, misleading advertising is still misleading advertising.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
As a USPS employee, I have this to say about your unwarranted and unfair comment about "courteous, competent employees": fuck you!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Agreed! I'd also *love* to see laws forcing EULAs to not lie about people's Constitutional rights. Same for FBI warnings on videotapes, and copyright notifications in books. Oops, way off topic now.
-Paul Komarek
Oh and just one more cent to add to the pile, do people REALLY need a 2.53 Ghz system on a truckload of RDRAM and a GeForce Ti 4600 for office apps, playing The Sims, and Internet browsing?
Rumor has it that the next release of M$ Office will have minimum requirements that are close to this.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I remember reading 56k ads as being 'blazing fast'. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
God, why not just use GigaFlops like real scientists do? These are numbers which actually mean something.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
be suing AMD for using Cyrix-like PR ratings that are obviously intended to deceive non-technically inclined consumers into thinking their chips run at clock speeds at or faster than their Intel competitors?
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Tomshardware.com has published some articles that really knocked the stuffing out of Intel. They published articles which exposed the failure of the Pentium 1.137 gigahertz. They exposed the poor performance of the Rambus memory.
But for the last year or too they seemed to be taking a lot softer line towards Intel. I was puzzled over this. Until recently, when I came across the following article about a former columnist at Tomshardware. He has his own hardware site now. If I understood this article properly, Tom re-edited and re-attributed Van Smith's articles, after his departure. And it sounds like when he was caught he yanked all of them. Altering the past like in 1984.
They are definitely all gone now.
I can't help wondering whether his departure was connected to THG cozying up to Intel.
Well.. we are talking about the states, where judges have been known to award *millions* for people receiving *hot* coffee from McDonald's (cost of McDonald's coffee: probably not more than $1.50).
Imagine that, you order a coffee and it's hot! What's the world coming to?? And then you spill it because you're fumbling with a cell phone or something and you're millions richer. If these plaintiffs get the same judge then methinks they're in luck...
"Caffeine is not an option. Caffeine is a way of life."
You make some telling points. Your history is accurate, and your predictions for the K8 are cogent, and stand a fair chance of coming true. However...
When Intel designed the P4's core, they went down one of the possible optimisation paths, that of lengthening the pipeline to improve clock speed scalability. It's certainly working, and now that Intel have got their RDRAM vs. DDR position sorted out, their future looks a lot brighter than it did 12 months ago. But there are other valid approaches too.
AMD have chosen another way, that of settling for the more modest MHz gains of process shrinks and focussing on improved IPC instead, mostly by attacking the memory bottleneck. The K8's drastically lowered memory access latency is due to its onboard memory controller, and that gives a very nice bump to your effective IPC. The P4, OTOH, while having bandwidth aplenty, will see greater restrictions as its clock speed scales from the increased latencies of its memory design.
As for bandwidth, the Sledgehammer's dual DDR design keeps it fed too, and better, it scales as you add CPUs thanks to the NUMA design. The P4/Xeon (and Itanium) multi-CPU architectures are limited by its traditional shared-bus approach. Maybe my perceptions are off (as I deal almost exclusively with multi-CPU workstations each day), but it may turn out that this is a greater limiting factor for Intel in the longer run.
And then there's the Itanium - still a shared-bus design (though now with Even More Bandwidth), but with a strange new ISA that puts the optimisation load on the compiler instead - and almost completely breaks with existing code. A clever design? Only if they can make it work acceptably before x86-64 gets too entrenched. Remember how Windows beat out OS/2? Backwards compatibility is often more important than a fancy new design. AMD have learnt that lesson.
Time will tell, of course. Both companies have chosen sensible but different approaches. It may just come down to marketing or staying power, and Intel do have the edge there.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
The relative performance of AMD and Intel equipment is highly software dependent.
Actually, the AMD only outperforms the Intel if you run software.
}B^)
-- Terry
There is one thing that Intel got very, very right: the P4 will keep itself from burning up by dropping its internal clock speed until its internal temperature remains below whatever its internal cutoff is. And it seems to do so smoothly (so that even when it's running more slowly, it's still running smoothly).
I can't tell you how cool that is. I've disconnected the CPU fan while running a benchmark test in a loop and watched as the system slowly dropped its speed to about half its original speed, and then it stabilized. And kept going as if nothing had happened. I did the same thing while a CPU-intensive screensaver was running to see if there would be any noticeable jerkiness and it was completely smooth at the visual level.
This is perfect for servers. If you lose the CPU fan or if the heatsink falls off, the system keeps going, which is exactly what you want for server duty! You, the admin of the box, may notice that the system is running slowly and investigate, but at least the system doesn't go down.
I'm sold on the P4 for that reason alone. The Athlon may be faster on a per-clock basis, but the P4 has it where it counts in the reliability department. And for some of us, reliability trumps speed.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Your absolutly correct, the other form of damages is called compensatory damages, which includes lost wages, medical bills, pain and suffering, etc. Usually these are no larger than 1-2 million unless its a wrongful death suit. My own idea for legal reform would be that all punative damages over say $1 million, goes to the government. Since it is only intended to punish the guilty party, why should the lawyers and lawsuit bringers be made rich?
Also, on the McDonald's suit, normal hot coffee (160-170 F, 70-75 C 343-348 K) doesn't give you second and third degree burns. The coffee was well above normal temperatures (its been a while but I think it was around 200 F (93C, 366 K), and the company had a pretty dumb reason for keeping it that hot, I think it saved them a batch a day if it was kept so hot. Needless to say the jury, in most states juries decide damages, and judges review them, felt that this was an aweful practice and hit McDonald's pretty hard. I can not remember if the award was later reduced, but if it was not that would indicated that it was pretty rational.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
is that it has about twice as many and as lengthy pipelines as PIII.
:)
Why, shouldn't it run faster with more piplines? As you may know execution involves out-of-bound branching and interrrupt/exceptions would invalid all the pre-fetch/pre-executed instructions in pipelines and cause pipeline-flushing. Longer/more pipelines with poor design would only cause more execution cycles to be wasted. That's why some benchmark would show better performance in PIII when such pipeline-flushing happens too frequent.
While I mentioned poor design, what is a good design? In Athlon(iirc tbird too), on average only half of the pre-fetch/executed instructions are flushed during exceptions thanks to some genuine algorithms. That makes Athlon better in some case even when it has lower Mhz.
I realized I'm oversimplied the details. I welcome comment, no flame please.
I mail between 10-15 pieces of mail per month ranging from 1st class letters to small ( 35 lbs) packages.
For a cut-rate price, my mail gets to most points in the continental US in 2-3 days. NY-SF is two days, NY-rural Alabama in three days.
Being a mailman/mailwoman for the USPS is a frustrating and sometimes maddening experience. Give them a break. I have had some shitty customer service experiences with the Post Office, but I've never encountered any as pretentious as the Slashdot crew.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Jumping a mass-transit turnstile in NYC is a class-A misdemeanor, with a maximum sentence of $5000 and/or 2 years in prison.
I wouldn't recommend it.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
> effective clock cycle when the P4 is hot is half of the advertized clock
If a P4 ever has to run at half speed, then it's an indication that something is seriously wrong.
The potential for the clock to run at half speen should never be taken in to consideration when determining the performance of the CPU.
You don't expect to set a world speed record in a car with the oil temperature warning light on do you? (Or at least, you don't expect to have a working car afterwards)
Advanced users are users too!
In typical /bot style you contiue [sic] to show your ignorance on all things "M$"
/botbasher style you continue to show your ignorance on all things "humorous" or "satirical."
And in typical
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
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
asynchronous designs are orders of magnitude harder to verify than synchronous ones. This is why no such major design (IIRC) has left the academia in the last couple of decades.
Not everything is the blame of the great satan of marketing.
Working for necessity's mother.
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.
Too bad the Xeon was not used as intended. A Xeon is not the best graphics rendering chip. It makes a great data and transaction server (it is a server chip).
A Truck may have lots of torque for pulling a 5th wheel trailer up a hill, but it won't corner well in an indy circuit. Use the right tool for the job for best results.
Computers are no longer general purpose arithmic logic units anymore. They have become specialized. Some are better at some tasks than others. That is why there are many benchmarks. Choice of OS and applications also play a big role.
The truth shall set you free!
Wow, I never heard about this before. It sounds great.
On a related note, I just spent the day servicing a server that lost a number of fans all at once. I've never seen anything like it. The box had lost the CPU fan, the power supply fan, the case fan, and one of the bay fans, and it was still running! Swapped all of the fans out for new ones, and the machine booted up just fine.
And to the person who said that dead CPUs make a hideous grinding noise, I can't hear that "hideous grinding noise" over the rest of the noise in a busy server room. Dead fans are found during scheduled checks.
The damage claim is essentially this:
When user A bought Pentium IV, based on
Intel's claim that 1.4 GHz Pentium IV is
much faster than 1.26 Pentium III, when
in actuality 1.26 Pentium III is faster,
user A of course felt cheated.
Now, to remedy the situation, Intel should come up with Pentium V (which will be on the market starting Jan 03, guaranteed !), Intel should start the Pentium V with 2.8 GHz, while the Pentium IV reaches 3.3 to 3.5 GHz range.
In that way, Intel can not be accused of false advertising and so on.
So let's wait until this coming January. Let's hope that Pentium V (at 2.8 GHz) runs faster than Pentium IV (at 3.3 GHz).
I have insider news that Intel is prepared to do just that.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
It's quite simple: CDex uses software error correction (based on the xiph.org paranoia library), iTunes does not.
What this means is that CDex reads each sector off the CD several times, compares the reads, and attempts to correct for jitter and other common read errors.
iTunes, on the other hand, doesn't. It simply reads each sector once off the CD, and believes what the CD drive hands to it.
This software error correction causes a major slowdown - my audio rip speed goes from about 16x down to about 2x. You probably won't notice the jitter correction either unless you've got good ears.
However, if you have some scratched CDs, compare the output of the two. The CDex rip will probably be listenable - even if the CD is so badly scratched that several sectors are totally unreadable, the paranoia library will attempt to smoothly interpolate between known good data. The iTunes rip, on the other hand, unless your CD drive is really good, will be unlistenable, with gaps and nasty audible errors.
This, of course, has precisely nothing to do with the relative processor speeds of your PC versus your Mac. Switch off the error correction in CDex and the Dell will almost certainly be faster.
Unfortunatly I'm still stuck coding to the desires of managment ratherthan the customer. Going on two years of CMM mumbo-jumbo and we still have a moron middle-manager shooting from the hip when it comes to requirements. Not to mention that any attempt to guage user satisfaction or ask for user input is shot down.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
- Athlon XP 1600+ == 1.4GHz
- Athlon XP 1800+ == 1.6GHz
And so onOf course when I bought my PC last November, I was sold a "1.6GHz" system with (you guessed it) an XP 1600+.
As for performance, yes, this CPU rocks, no deception implied here.
actually a p1-166 with 64 meg or so of ram is pretty decent when setting on a 100mbit line going to a t3 regardless of the website content..
I always thought this (VTEC stickers on other vehicles) was a hilarious comment on the people who obsess about having the right stickers to describe their car's engine.
... wah.
You just need a car that's so obviously not a Civic... A huge Buick or something.
I don't see why people with real VTEC engines mind, it just means that they'll have an unexpected performance advantage if they ever race, because nobody expected their sticker to be real. And if they're upset because nobody can tell that they spent more
Lastly, if you think there is a problem with your post office then write to your local postmaster about it. Be clear and state your observations and what you think could be done. If all you feel up to is shitting on people who do their jobs, even when some fscking nut was sending anthrax through the mail, then you're no improvement.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Actually, it's not a heat problem they are detecting per se.
It's a power consumption issue.
When the processor uses over 54.7 watts of power it will lower its speed until it is under that threshold.
It's a stupid way to stop "overheating" and has been previously covered here.
HTH.
>You don't expect to set a world speed record in a car with the oil temperature warning light on do you?
Not unless the warning light came on after 5 seconds of high performance use. At that point you're going to have to ignore that light to properly use the vehicle.
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
as well as selling under false pretenses.
Intel makes it out that you want to get a P4 because it provides higher performance and is faster than a P3.
This is not the case.
It's like If I sell you a car, tell you it's faster than last years model, so you buy it, then it turns out to be slower.