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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!"
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.)
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.
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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