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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."
Wouldn't a better CPU benchmarks be taken by using the chipmakers' own compilers?
I have been pwned because my
What this says is that SySMark is really poorly coded, not "optimized" to favour Intel silicon. Incompetancy isn't evil. It's just...incompetant. This would explain why most serious benchmark runs seem to lack SysMark these days...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
I hate to say this, I am a big AMD fan, but it is partialy AMD's fault that SysMark favors Intel. They have refused to work with the BABCo people in the past knowing the Intel people have. Is it any suprise that they end up favofing the company that works with them over the one that ignores them? AMD is now supposeidly working with them to make the next version do a more fair job testing their proccesors. So hopefully this will be a non issue in future realeses. It would prob be most fair if AMD and Intel would both let the benchmarking programs be written with out either of their interfiernce, but if one is going to get invloved, then they both realy need to.
"Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform." -- Mark Twain
Well in this case the comparison is between two x86 cpu's, the athlon and the pentium4. Both would support standard x86 instructions. If you want to measure how fast the cpu is you would want the program to be unoptimized. Perhaps SSE would be fine since both cpu's support it.
Using optimizations wouldn't be fair unless you had a good idea of the percentage of programs that ARE optimized for one or both cpu's. Many new programs are optimized for both cpu's, such as Cubase SX, a software studio program. I suppose you could use one of those programs as a benchmark in addition to the raw unoptimized open-source one so you can get an idea of how well the cpu performs with or without it's appropriate optimizations. Also, it makes a difference wether there is a free version of the optimized compiler, because if there isn't, there is a higher chance that programs made by individuals at home (who can't afford a 500$ compiler) would not be optimized.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Here's Kyle's 4th Edition post from yesterday. Excerpts from Van's comments are in italics.
VansHardware & AMD: There is a report on VansHardware this morning that visits the differences between BAPCo's SysMark 2001 and SysMark 2002. The report's basic theme is that SysMark 2002 is skewed towards making the Intel Pentium 4 results look better than the AMD CPU results could have looked. It basically shows examples of things that were changed in SysMark 2002 that cherry pick areas in certain programs that the Pentium 4 excels at. While the article might seem to be work done by VansHardware there is something you need to know. All of the data shown in that article has been put together by AMD and not VansHardware. Take note of this one statement in the article.
However, AMD has been able to "pick the lock" on SysMark to gain a much keener understanding into the internal workings of these tests.
VansHardware is not the one with the "keener understanding", AMD is.
The original PDF document from AMD is linked for download so the fact that this data is not Van's is not exactly hidden either.
Also their opening paragraphs state this.
At this moment we will pause from the long march through our benchmark results to revisit the significant issues regarding BAPCo's SysMark 2002 brought up by AMD during our recent meeting with representatives from that chipmaker.
We must state up front that despite the condemning information divulged to us, the AMD spokesmen repeatedly expressed support and guarded optimism for the reformation of BAPCo.
The "significant issues" and "condemming information" shown were not harvested by VansHardware, actually all they do is interject a little bit of commentary.
AMD has verified to me this morning that all of the graphed and tabled data shown on the VansHardware report is data that has been mined by AMD. Does this make the data inaccurate? Of course not, but I am sure that it hardly shows both sides of the story. AMD is not going to supply VansHardware with information that makes Intel look good. VansHardware represents to me, nothing more than an AMD fansite that takes shots at Intel every chance they get. I think they are far from what anyone could consider objective journalist and reporters. Them doing a cut and paste job with AMD's data goes to show that as true in my opinion. Websites get fed information all the time, trust us, we know. It is our jobs to go back and prove data and claims in our labs on our own time, not to repost corporate data, that can be considered far from objective. Independent sites in our hardware community should not be reposting PR spin in such a way as this. There is a fine line here but I think this is stepping across it.
VansHardware does not exactly hide the fact that the data shown is not theirs but rather AMD's, but they certainly did not seem to represent that in an upfront manner so the reader sees the information for being exactly what it is...data released by the AMD PR machine.
I am a huge AMD fan but I just don't like big companies being able to pump their corporate data into our community when it is not presented as such. I think AMD should have the balls to post information like this on their own website and not try and "slip it in" through a back door. In fact, I would consider the information to be much more credible if it were posted on AMD's own website as AMD research.
I know Van has gotten upset here recently with his past employer removing his name from articles he has written. It seems to me that Van has done little to deserve his name being on this article and it should show authored by AMD.
(ED NOTE - This is referring to some allegedly plagiarised articles that Tom's Hardware published after removing Van's name from them)
Also worthy of mentioning is that AMD is now fully working with BAPCo, which they have not done in the past. AMD has had the ability to work with BAPCo for a long time now to make sure their products get represented properly and we are certainly happy to finally see AMD join the party to give the boat a more even keel.
Lastly, another tidbit worth throwing into the mix is that Van Smith, owner of VansHardware, possibly either works for or is contracted to VIA as a CPU validation tester. We are working on a confirmation of this from VIA now. Do we need hardware websites that do work for the companies they end up reporting on? Just another thing to consider when objectivity is in question.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
This would seem when Van's COMPREHENSIVE OPEN SOURCE BENCHMARK INITIATIVE (COSBI) would be useful... You could always get in touch with Van about helping out the project...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Yeah random PC hardware fans can do "meta-benchmarking" and decide if the benchmarks are accurately portrayed.... now if they could only do something like that to the mods here....
Besides, AMD has always been the value chip company. You can't expect them to keep up with Intel forever.
AMD has had a superior (in design) processor architecture to Intel since the K6 was released (though the K6 had mediocre FPU performance, the design was still more elegant--ask any x86 assembly programmer). The Athlon has given the P2, P3, AND P4 a run for its money, and early benchmarks of the hammer would seem to indicate that the expensive Itanium 2, which almost nobody actually uses, is going to be outrun as well.
The Pentium IV's really looong pipeline does allow the P4 to run at higher clockspeeds, but the branch prediction you mentioned is instant death. Branch mispredictions happen VERY frequently in any CPU (note the K6 had the most sophisticated branch prediction unit up until the "XP" series of Athlons) but with the Pentium IV, a single branch prediction requires up to 20 full clock cycles of work to be discarded.
The Pentium IV has other questionable design desisions that hurt performance as well. It has 8K of L1 cache, the same amount found in the ancient 486 processor, whereas the Athlon has that amount squared and doubled (128K). Current P4's have more L2 cache, but L2 cache is less important and slower. (Note though that the P4's L2 cache is particularly fast L2 cache)
The P4 has buffers to remember a series of decoded x86 instructions so that it does not have to decode them again--these are almost required because of the terribly long pipeline--but it doesn't have enough to speed things up in server environments. Most servers execute a wide variety of instructions such that the buffered instructions get very little use before being replaced by new instructions. This is even more a problem on systems that run many different applications at once, but this problem can be demonstrated just with DB servers (which use plenty of instructions) as the P4 tends to not scale as well as the Athlon MP when a second or third task is added (such as mail serving, web serving, etc.)
One dissapointment that I had with the Athlon is that AMD never used the excellent EV6 bus to its fullest. Athlons are superior in multiprocessor capabilities because different processors needn't share access to the memory bus. On Intel SMP setups, even on P4 Xeons (Which, IMO, are inferior to P3 Tualatin chips by the same company) when one CPU accesses main memory, it locks main memory for the other CPUs. All other CPUs have to sit and twiddle their transistors while the main memory is on use by only one CPU.
On AMD SMP setups, ALL processors can simultaneous access memory, merely sharing the bandwidth simultaneously. So, if one CPU is only using 100MB of memory bandwidth, the rest can be used by other CPUs at that time.
Unfortunately, this doesn't really matter much with only two CPUs, which is the largest AMD configuration you can get. You can, of course, see it in action with 8+ CPUs on EV6 Alpha setups (AMD licensed the bus from DEC's Alpha team) but Alpha setups are expensive as hell and are a dying breed.
If AMD had created a quad or 8-way setup, we would see the true power of a good design.
Fortunately, the Hammer has an even better design (one made by AMD no less) on an even better CPU. I fully expect the Hammer series to wipe the floor with all Xeons and possibly the Itanium 2 because of its design. An integrated memory controller that will tremendously drop memory latency, twice as many general-purpose registers of twice the size (Much less pushing and popping, for those that know some assembly) and, unlike the big vendor 64-bit processors, the ability to split half of the general purpose registers into chunks of 16 and 32 bits when huge numbers (2^64) are not needed. (On an Alpha/SPARC/R12000, if you want to store the number "42" you must use all of a register that can hold values up to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. A bit wasteful)
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