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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.
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!"
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...
"The best argument against democracy is a five minute chat with the average voter."
--Winston Churchill
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?
--
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.
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.)
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
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.
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]
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.
...and it takes double the clock speed on the PC to equal the speed of Photoshop on a Mac. Your point?
(* 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.
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
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.
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