Benchmark Program Rewritten to Favor Intel?

BrookHarty writes "Interesting article over at Van's Hardware, that BAPCo the maker of the SysMark benchmarking program, has re-written its SysMark 2002 benchmark program in favor of Intels P4. AMD joined BAPCo in order to "correct" these "broken" results. AMD reports that BAPCo's SysMark 2002 (written by Intel Engineers) is a collection of tasks to summarize "Real World" performance. Interestingly, these tasks are selected for Intel's favored performance, while removing certain tasks that favor AMD. Vans Hardware has additional information on BAPCo's Shady history."

Comments

Big deal

[ObviousGuy]

The P4 has that long pipeline that allows it to speed up quite a bit, so long as the branch prediction doesn't blow it. As compilers become tuned to exploit this, it's plausible that the Athlon's performance is going to lag quite a bit more than it already does. That there is some benchmark out there that is specifically designed to show off this strength of the P4 is no real surprise to anyone, is it?

Heck, this is what Sun was doing a few years back. It's almost an industry standard to have your own "benchmark lab" on the payroll.

Besides, AMD has always been the value chip company. You can't expect them to keep up with Intel forever.

Yawn

[Sebastopol]

Is Intel forcing anyone to use BapCo benchmarks? Aren't there dozens of websites out there with their own? Just look at any chip review on Tom's Hardware or Anandtech, Sysmark is only one of many benchmarks used.

Is this a surprise? Are people actually "outraged"? Please. Are you trying to tell me AMD has never hand-picked their own benchmarks?

Any CPU manufacturer will pick the benchmark that makes them look best but try to play it down, and then use that score extensively as propaganda.

Just look at when Apple used Bytemark to claim a 400% performance boost over intel chips -- of course, they used the 486-compiled version on a P6 core, but they didn't let that little nugget of disniformation get in their way.

Intel, AMD, Apple -- all whores.