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The Register Finds Fault In Turion Benchmark Setup
An anonymous reader submits "From The Register, it appears that AMD has joined Intel, ATI, nVidia, and just about every other hardware manufacturer on the planet in benchmark fiddling. The benchmarks for the Turion appear to have been compared using quite different systems - a 35 watt Turion 64 with an ATI GPU versus a 25 watt Pentium M with an Intel integrated graphics processor. Sadly, it appears the original benchmarks were too good to be true."
Oddly, the register article reads like an opinion piece, focusing on how AMD should care more about battery life.
AMD is perfect. Nothing to see here. Please move along.
Soon we will have benchmark woodwinds, benchmark flutes, and worst of all benchmark trumpets. Off course it will come together as all that benchmark jazz. . .
But hell, in the desktop market they're kings, and everybody knows that. It's too bad they had to resort to benchmark fixing for a mobile processor.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
It's not like you can trust the PC hardware web sites any more than you can trust the vendors anyways. There's a high road? Where?? =P
Just register them to be opened by ghostview. It starts up instantly and in a seperate window.
According to the article, their laptop processor beat out the intel processor only by a 'small margin'. They have to release benchmark press releases, so, being a business interested in profit, they stack things.
They make some of the best chips on the market. Doesn't keep them from being 'just another business'.
The article says "Reynolds said... that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products." That sounds like its just a comparison of the 27W to 35W specs of the processors. However, since both companies have their own systems to dynamically scale back power by slowing down the CPU like SpeedStep and PowerNow, could the power labels be inaccurate as a measure of battery life in this case? Just like how clock-vs-clock benchmarks are no longer valid, could the same now be true about Watt-vs-Watt measurements?
*shrugs* Then again, AMD might just be flat out decieving on the benchmarks because they are thinking of their shareholders rather than their customers.
--
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Wired article as proof
From TFA:
This kind of trickery in the benchmark game does little for the vendor.
I have to disagree with this one. Fudging benchmarks almost always helps the vendor, except with very specialized (/.) audiences.
Remember, most people just see a bunch of random numbers when they shop for laptops, and compare processors based on GHz. They're more likely to read a blurb (or hear from the salesperson) that Turion outperforms it's competitors than they are to search blogs about the truth to the claim.
Now, by making enough of a fuss over this, we can create negative publicity, but why rag on AMD when, as the article states, all the other companies have set precedent?
It seems like this is becoming necessary (well, maybe not fiddling, but at least adding additional support for certain applications).
For example, Half-Life 2 is a very popular game. If nVidia starts messing with their drivers to run HL2 better, but ATI does not, then guess who HL2 fans are going to buy from?
I know -- the case mentioned in this article is completely different and not a useful change -- but it just got me thinking about past occurances.
It seems like drivers for GPUs should be able to run well in general, and applications should be catered to them, rather than the other way around, but I guess it's just not a viable option.
*Hugs his Pentium 4*
bloodclotjungletekno
In other news, I think oranges taste much better than apples.
The Dude abides.
All benchmarks are 32-bit. Turion is 64-bit.
I wonder how it will perform with 64-bit linux. Well, I'm going to see when some brand name shows up with Turion in his higher class.
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
A fair comparison of power use would include total power used by cpu+chipset+video+memory. I remember reading somewhere that AMD cpu doesn't need northbridge, so that may give it an edge in total power use.
in the gaming benchmarks. Anyone with half an interest in games would see that one, right off the bat.
On a related side note, I've never seen these graphs before. I'm not sure if I just read reputable sites, or if I just didn't happen to see these "official benchmarks" before.
"up to one-third less battery"
Not "one-third of".
I think you meant Acrobat you want to boycott, not pdf. Xpdf loads the document in a snap for me.
Exactly. I can get around 2.5 hours on my laptop with a 62-watt mobile Athlon 64, so the battery life shouldn't be too bad.
Adobe will convert them. Next time google before you beg.
Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
Acrobat Reader is the culprit, not the file format.
OS X's preview app loads PDF's up as fast as the Notepad app loads up text files in Windows.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
Press and hold the shift key as soon as Acrobat begins to launch. It'll skip the initialization process of the mostly-useless plugins. Doing this decreases the load-up time to less than two seconds on my 500mhz Celeron.
that gives you 20x speed boost
6.0 was slow as hel1
Never used a Mac OS X computer then, have you. PDF renders like lightning. Searching them is wicked fast too!
" Acrobat Reader is the culprit"
Which is why I'm still on 5.0. Seems to be about 3X faster than the latest bloated slug of a program that Adobe released.
DRM 'manages access' in the same way that a prison 'manages freedom'
Sorry, I'm boycotting douchebags who complain about a file format they clearly don't understand. If you can't be bothered to find better software than Acrobat, you deserve everything you get.
i'm pretty sure they had a hard time finding an intel integrated graphics processor to use with the turion.
> They lag like hell, no matter how fast a computer I'm on
Your choice of software is poor.
512K of L2 cache is suckage, especially for a processor with a slow bus speed (and in a laptop that's always the case). The benchmarks were too good to believe in them. There's simply no competition to P-M on the market at this point. Even Transmeta is smoking nervously in the corner.
I got modded through the floor for saying this when these benchmarks first appeared. Now it turns out I was right.
Intel shows it's thermal design power (TDP) at 27 watts for the 2Ghz chip, while AMD shows 35 watts. This is, however, an apples to oranges comparison. Intel's Prescott P4 at 2.8Ghz has a TDP of 89 watts, the same as an Athlon64 2800+. But according to this link, the P4 will actually draw 179 watts compared to the Athlon's 115. So, if the "marketing delta" holds true for the mobile line as well, we can expect the AMD solution rated at 35 watts to use roughly 45 watts of power at load, while the "27-watt" Pentium M will take 54 watts.
According to TFA, Turion notebooks might have 1/3 the battery life of Intel's Ultra Low voltage products. Now, Intel has a separate line of ultra-low-voltage Pentium M's, not to be confused with normal Pentium M's. The ultra low voltage Pentium Ms are only available at 1-1.2 Ghz, Turion's bottom out at 1.6 Ghz. So it's not a fair comparison. Regardless, with the power taken from the LCD and hard drives and stuff, I doubt it's even possible for an ultra low voltage Pentium M having 3 times the battery life of a Turion using the same battery.
So AMD and some other companies did some benchmarks with unequal systems. And?
It would certainly have been less misleading to use an Intel laptop with a similar video card at least, but it isn't like you are going to see these benchmarks on television ads or anything. I doubt any big buyers will care about benchmarks of pre-release products anyway.
Granted, this is rather shady of AMD, but it doesn't even approach the raw evil of, say, a company joining BAPCO and systematically removing all benchmarks in their Sysmark tool in which AMD wins. No, that would be unprecedented in this industry's history.
It's also noteworthy that TheRegister has a partnership with Tom's Hardware in the U.S., and some editors of Tom's have been noted as being overtly biased towards Intel, though Tom's itself seems to be getting better, having articles like the used to--real tech info rather than the sensationalized, poorly written crap which had infested my once favorite hardware site.
Granted, both AMD and Intel are "evil" for-profit companies, but something like an unfair benchmark hardly brings tears to the eye when you consider some of the staggering bullshit actions of the past.
What it all comes down to is preference--The Turion is going to be a 64-bit chip (isn't it?) with the benefits of AMD64 mode (most of which involve the fact that it has double the general-purpose registers in the chip, and not from the fact that those registers are 64-bits wide). The Turion will likely outperform the Pentium-M in most test, like the Athlon64.
The Pentium-M, however, will perform just fine thankyou, and will drain less battery power and thus be in cooler-running laptops with better battery life.
I'd pick the Pentium-M myself, since to choose a product based on anything other than overall effectiveness/price ratio set is usually either fanboyism or poor research.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
A couple years ago, I was at an AMD Press event thingy because they were giving away free stuff. At the event they computers set up with UT2003. Yes, they did the same thing. They gave they the intel computers onboard graphics, while thier computers had nvidia cards.
Games especailly are bound to the video card in terms of performance.
Fair?
Yeah, right.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Yeah, but then you have Safari rabbit droppings all over the desktop which have to be deleted manually, it's a pain in the ass to resize the Preview window to make the text legible every time, not to mention scrolling through the text or finding anything. Also, I think the kid in the Preview icon is butt-ugly, to be honest. I don't like having to stare at his mug both on the task-bar and miniaturized in the rabbit dropping icons.
There simply is no reason to use PDF for this sort of thing.
With great power comes great fan noise.
If I recalled correctly, nVidia or ATI fiddled with benchmarks by disabling certain features which take up a lot of processing power when they detected 3dmark or other benchmarking utilities.
Technically AMD didn't falsify their benchmarks by disabling certain features. They just chose a easier opponent to fight with. (sorta like when one picks a fight with someone that looks way weaker than you to guarantee you a win).
What I find weird benchmarks usually don't just give out percentages, but actual figures. Like # of flops per second, etc. I'm not sure if any other graphs were provided, but from the links that were in the opening topic, they were all percentages. If the benchmark had listed actual results, it would've been easier to do actual comparisons with other cpus which were not benchmarked against.
Saying all that, I don't believe AMD falsified any information (unlike nVidia or ATI). What they did was purely comparing a weaker opponent. Sorta like taking the ATI Radeon 9800 and comparing it to the nVidia Geforce MX440. But comparisons like that do exist when you do a wide range of benchmarking. That's why I always make sure I know what the heck is being benchmarked or else, it'd be just throwing #s at me. It's nice that newer benchmarks tell you if higher is better or if lower is better. Sometimes it's quite easy to get confused on if something w/ a higher # is better or not.
HD Trailers
I realize that it's the plug-ins that slow Acrobat down, but the real question is why does Adobe have them all enabled by default? It makes everyone hate .pdf files and generally makes their product seem like shit.
While the article accuses AMD of comparing "Apples vs. Bananas" (their subtitle, not mine) the author includes a pro-Intel quote containing the same type of flawed comparison they accuse AMD of making. Much of the article was complaining about the lack of battery life benchmarks. Example:
"The answer is that the battery life isn't so good," Reynolds said, adding that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products.
Turion is not an ultra low voltage CPU and does not claim to be. Guess why Intel's ultra low voltage products are ultra low voltage products? It's because their clock speed is limited to a mere 1.2GHz so the voltage can be lowered to reduce power consumption and increase battery life. Had AMD compared the 2GHz Turion to a ULV 1.2GHz Pentium M, yes, Turion battery life would be lower, but AMD's benchmarks would have been a legitimate 50+% higher.
1st, why is AMD naming operating techniques with that 'n' in there (so far as I know, there's cool'n'quiet and thin'n'light)?
McDonald's has a sandwich called the big'n'tasty. Does this mean that I will soon be able to get my McAthlon with fries (and greasy thermal paste on top)?
I don't know about you, but I think the future will taste delicious!
Secondly, (and more seriously) does this question the validity of the performance their other products, such as athlon64? Or have those other lines of products so far been tested true?
It makes me concerned because I was dumb enough to spend more money than I should've on an athlon64 3400+ (I should've waited until the price dropped. But, I really wanted it!)
In any case, I still prefer athlons over pentiums.
Or xpdf...
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Turion is faster than P-M, too. Except they "forgot" that Intel chip used integrated graphics.
Look at the system specs yourself.
They are both absolute base systems that share clockspeed, memory and price.
It's not like we are comparing G4s to P4s here.
As for power consumption, had he bothered to actually dive into the whitepapers, he would find that particular Turion at 35 w while the Pentium M is 27.
No mention is made of the Turions available at 25w.
But he does mention the 9 watt Pentium M that runs at half the clockspeed taking it completely out of this class.
Mentions the 35,27 and 9 but not 25.
No, no, that might be a favorable data point.
Might as well be a Fox Spinner.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
One of the biggest problems the Register had with the AMD test setup versus the Intel test setup is that the AMD setup "had a graphics processor from ATI" while the Intel setup had "Intel's integrated graphics processor". It doesn't mention that the ATI video, the Mobility Radeon Xpress 200 series, is also an integrated solution.
. aspx?i=2269&p=18) Anandtech review of the chipset the the Xpress 200 integrated graphics debuted on. As expected of integrated graphics, it performs much worse than the lowest tier graphics cards ATI is currently making, the Radeon X300.
From the article, "An AMD spokeswoman insisted the company picked 'the most comparable offering from the competitor' that it could find, even though it didn't actually do that."
Well, AMD doesn't make any integrated graphics solutions, and the Radeon Xpress 200 series is one of the only integrated graphics options available. Benchmarks of the Radeon Xpress 200 can be found in this(http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc
AMD rigging benchmarks? Maybe. But the proposition that AMD did not choose the closest video to Intel's offering -- that it had availale -- is false.
The more sensational the report, the more hits the Register will recieve. It is ironic that while chastising AMD for fiddling benchmarks to sell more units, it fiddles with rhetoric to increase popularity.
(I type this at a Pentium M laptop, this is not AMD fanboyism)
Alternatively delete all the plugins in the pdf folder. Or hold shift when it starts. I'm sorry that shit needs to go!
I guess the devil went down to new orleans.
Several years ago AMD was caught redhanded when they published "benchmarks" showing their then-current CPUs were faster than the Pentiums of the time.
Problem was they had compared their CPUs against Celerons, using highspec motherboard for their own systems and lowspec ones for the Intel CPUs, and ran only software specifically optimised for performance on AMD CPUs (using AMD specific libraries and instructions, and emulation when run on Intel).
My first laptop was an Athlon 1.2, and the battery life majorly sucked (i'm talking mere minutes not even close to an hour), you may have even said "battery...what battery?" So when I enrolled in a Game Dev class I needed to upgrade due to crappy video. I got an athlon64 based system and my friend got a Pentium-M centrino system with similar video and similar processor speed, etc. and my machine will run circles around theirs. If i'm running on battery, I dim my screen, etc. Granted, I do not have quite the battery life as they do, but I feel I have a very nice balance between power and battery life.
AMD has made some major headway in the mobile processor market and I believe they will continue making improvements. Just look what they did with desktop processors and look what they have already done with their mobile processors. Its unfortunate that the test setup was flawed, but the 'centrino' package is being pushed very hard in advertising. I'm not trying to make any excuses, and I admit that I haven't done much research since I got my notebook, but are there many notebooks offered with the 25 watt pentium-M that isn't centrino based?
Increasingly, yes, investors look primarily at the short term.
That's not the way it used to be, though, and not everyone takes that view. Implying that all investors -- and all investment companies -- are alike in their outlook is misleading.
offtopic my ass, he said "proprietary" and that's completely false. at least have the decency to mod flamebait like an slightly intelligent monkey.
The argument is that the wattage of the two compared CPUs was not identical, and therefore the results should not be compared.
Does this mean that it's "fiddling" to compare a high wattage Prescott core Pentium 4 with a lower
wattage Athlon 64?
Would it be "fiddling" if you matched laptop wattage overall? (The P-M needs more support chips after all). Would it be "fiddling" if you matched chips based on equal price? Would it be "fiddling" if you matched laptops based on equal weight?
No. The comparison of the chips is fair.. AMD wasn't being deceptive about which chips they were comparing. The price, weight, frequency, cache size, wattage, and instruction set support of both chips are not secret.
The Register is just making noise to get notice and readers.
The Intel is obviously CPU-bound in the gaming benchmarks. Anyone with half an interest in games would see that one, right off the bat.
That is wrong. The Intel system is graphics bound, not CPU bound. In a clock-for-clock comparison Pentium M performs very similar to Athlon 64 in gaming performance when a high end video card is used as Tech Report, Anandtech, Sudhian and others have shown.
The problem with Intel's gaming performance in this review falls squarely on the low performance of Intel's integrated graphics. It is a problem of Intel's making. Intel will not let vendors use the Centrino name unless an Intel chipset is used. Being frozen out of the Centrino notebook market discourages others like ATI from creating better integrated graphics solutions for Pentium M.
1. AMD used a standard mobile chipset for it's notebook -- and ATI chipset, with integrated graphics. Then they used an intel chipset with integrated graphics. 2. It compared a 2ghz part to a 2ghz part -- it's a reasonable thing to do as an AMD sponsored benchmark. Still no fiddling. 3. The register author does a lot more speculating and throws a few w.a.g'es out there regarding battery life. They're trying to get mfrs interested in their new product. 4. We won't really know about battery life until we see fraternal twin laptops. IE: all other things being equal -- processor / chipset different. To be honest, I have no idea how it will turn out -- it'll be interesting to see. In short -- the author (dishonestly) takes a matter of opinion and presents it as a matter of principle. AMD vs Intel aside -- find some integrity buddy.
Let me guess, you're an AMD fanboi.
Let's take a look at the specs of test systems side by side, shall we?
Intel system has this shitty "Extreme" integrated graphics with no dedicated RAM. If you've ever used a system with Intel Extreme integrated graphics, you know it's dog slow. Putting it into a laptop with slowish system bus doesn't make it any better.
Now let's look at AMD system. It has integrated GPU (!) from one of the leaders in computer graphics hardware with _32M_ of _dedicated_ Video RAM. I wonder if I've emphasized this clearly enough to get through your thick skull.
You don't have to be a genius to say that AMD system has an advantage when it comes to 3D graphics.
Wouldn't it be cool if instead of cooking the benchmarks AMD put the processors head to head and made them use the same Radeon Mobility 9600 card with 128M RAM? Why didn't they do this? Were they afraid of something?
I mean, come on, we all know that they make the best desktop processors at this point. Their mobile chips, however, leave much to be desired, and with the release of this Turion chip status quo remains the same.
In the register article :
... but just for the battery...
"The answer is that the battery life isn't so good," Reynolds said, adding that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products.
so this Gartner analyst is trying to shift from the 25W pentium M that is often benchmarked to the 5W ULV one
#include "coucou.h"
Acctually, to feed the offtopic-ness, the latest offering of Acrobat Reader from Adobe is the most lightweight version (memory and starup wise) of any version since 4.0. The thing starts up almost instantly on my machine.
AMD wattage includs the memory controller. Do anyone know how much watt take the Intel memory controller (without the integrated graphic) ?
ok according to the specs and the way INTEL has been doing comparisons the same mhz to mhz is all that matters. As for all the tests except the gameing tests do not use the vid card, so they are valid... This is just a non-issue.
Not an AMD fanboy for the record
---In a time of Chimpanzees I was a Monkey.
AMD said they used "most comparable offering from the competitor" for the comparison, and didn't. Now, that's a fault, mmkay?
because, though some still look long term, one merely has to look at the behavior of companies, and it becomes quite clear which camp of investors they generally cater to. Next Quarter is king.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
There are 3 kind of lies: lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
Statistic says: if you've got your head into a freezer and your butt into a oven you are at optimal temperature.
yeah right. get a crap system just to render crap files. and tell everyone how great it is.
thats mac thinking for you.
The stuff in the article about battery life is simply rubbish - even if you assume that the P-M combo is only 30W in total, when the screen, hard disk, networking etc. is added in you are probably looking at a difference in average power of only a few percent. The article is clearly an Intel plant, or written by someone who has no idea at all of how laptop computers function.
Up till now, though I use an AMD64 laptop myself as a development tool and am very happy with it, I have been advising other people to buy P-M, based on their need for battery life and the undoubted benefits of the 2Mbyte cache versus the 1Mbyte in the majority of AMD64s. (a 2Mbyte cache allows me to run a demo of our server application on a notebook at quite convincing speed.) But with the coming WinXP64 release, the new AMD processors look like having a bit more future proofing and no obvious downside. I guess this one, outside the corporate We-buy-Dell-because-nobody-ever-got-sacked-for-buy ing-Dell arena, will be decided on price. And I am not alone in this. Have you noticed how cheap P-M notebooks have been getting recently? Doubtless Intel too is preparing an interesting release and wants all the old stock off the shelves.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
SUMMARY: Hewlett-Packard is barred from advertising the NX bit capability of AMD processors because Intel cannot offer same.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21862
HP finds difficulty choosing between AMD, Intel
That pesky little bit of information
By Esther Tigre: Tuesday 15 March 2005, 19:38
A MESSAGE on influential and usually pretty intelligent investor's board, Silicon Investor, suggests that HP is reluctant to advertise AMD boxes because it might upset Intel.
Intel gets upset very easily indeed, and sometimes can prematurely throw its toys out of its pram, so we can readily understand HP's reluctance, but actually customer is king so maybe it should re-think its stance.
According to the message, a customer relations chap told the AMD investor that he wanted to buy a machine which included the protection bit that's implemented in most of the Sunnyvale firm's microprocessors.
But, he continued, it was hard to find out which machines from HP implemented the buffer overflow bit. According to the rep, the reason why HP didn't mention the NX bit was probably because Intel had placed a restriction on such information.
Obviously anyone who is an AMD share investor has an axe to grind, but we do find it interesting because, as the investor points out here , implementation of the buffer protect in hardware can significantly blot out many viruses.
No, 0.5W is not possible. Just see the heatsink of a north bridge. Memory use dam heavy I/O drivers to get maximum transfert speed while driving high capacitive lines. And this is without take in account the internel logic.
0 1467.htm and in page 257 you can find the power characteristics:
I find the datasheet of the 915PL north bridge (without the integrated graphic) http://www.intel.co.jp/design/chipsets/datashts/3
Core at 1.5V discret take 7.7A => 11.5W
I don't count VTT bus and others since Turion have no PCI-E but have HyperTransport. But in next page you have the DDR table:
DDR interface at 2.6V take 4.1A => 10.6W
So the memory subsystem on intel can burn as high as 22W! Even if this number are two time too high, this put Intel to 27W + 11W = 38W at the minimum.
Now AMD with 35W look far better...
Except they did use the most comparable offering.
...
Same clock speed.
Integrated graphics, it isn't AMD's fault that the Centrino integrated graphics suck at 3D applications.
Same HD, same memory,
Same price, apparently.
AMD's TDP is theoretical max. Intel's is achievable max, which is about 80% of theoretical max. AMD's processor also includes a memory controller, which is 2.2W. So (35 - 2.2) * 0.8 = 26.24W, which compares pretty much EXACTLY with Intel's 27W TDP!
I think this test is extremely fair. And yes, if battery life is lower, that is a loss to AMD, but don't compare a 25W or 35W Turion to a 9W or 16W Pentium M either.
Geogriffith is boycotting PDFs? Shit, I'll be sure to bring it up at the next Meeting of the the Internet Elders Council. They should have Adobe liquidated and the format obsoleted by next month.
Fucking cretin. Have fun boycotting whatever the shit you want. Just remember that the net effect of the whole campaign is merely you getting laughed at for being the worthless fucking peon that you are.
I mean, ffs, I'm used to some "creative puffering", conveniently omitting the inconvenient details, and other euphemisms for "lies". But the whole computer industry is already well into outright fraud territory, and some are leading a cavalry charge deep into it.
... it's just put a pressure on others to do the same. If you're the honest guy who says "ok, ours are 28 dBA", you lose sales to the cons and frauds claiming "21 dBA" for theirs. So everyone else started doing the same thing: now you have a wide choice of fans with outright fraud specs, including from Sharkoon, ThermalRight, and a bunch of others.
As just an example of outright fraud: It's gotten to the point where, for example, a dishonest heatsink manufacturer can buy a 28 dBA Panaflo fan and sell it as a 21 dBA fan. And then start selling an even noisier ball-bearing fan instead and _still_ claim 21 dBA.
And I'd love to finger one single fraudster for that. Like, ThermalTake, who did it with their "SilentBoost". But incidentally it shows the other bad effect of allowing lies and fraud:
And that's just one example.
And I'd rather see _some_ honesty restored to this industry, rather than shrug it off as "oh, cool, now the CPU manufacturers are cheating too. Well, it's marketting so it's normal."
No, it's not normal. There's a very clear legal term for selling something under deliberately false and mis-leading terms about what it does or how well: it's "fraud". And I think it's damn overdue that something was done about it in this industry.
In no other industry would that be tolerated to this shameless extent. If Joe's Construction Co buys a ton of I-beams from Jack's Steel Mill Inc, and they were supposed to have 1% carbon, Joe actually expects them to match that. You can't deliver pig iron instead and go "oh, well, it was just marketting. Don't tell me you actually expected to get 1% carbon steel for that price. Sucks to be you."
If Jack's Steel Mill delivered pig iron instead of the steel it advertised, it faces some very nasty lawsuits. Much nastier if those beams were used in, say, a bridge, and it collapsed.
And IMHO it's about damn time the same started applying to the computer industry too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I mean, I know it's /. and reading before writing should not generally be expected, but I'd think that when you provide a link you've at least read what's written there.
The power draw on SPCR was for _whole_ _systems_ built around those CPUs. They even say they include the:
- PSU, which probably accounts for some 30%+ of the total power draw. And here's the fun part: the PSU efficiency is not constant, but depends on the load. So did it contribute more or less to the P4 systems than to the A64 ones?
- IBM 40 GB Desktar 120GXP HDD. From personal experience, I can tell you that it's _not_ a cool'n'quiet HDD. Placing two of those above each others without fans, well, now that cost me two HDDs worth of data. (And it sounds like a chainsaw too, but that's beside the point.)
- Asus GeForce FX 5900 Ultra VGA. Again, not a cool or quiet card by any stretch of imagination. In fact, it's the original NVidia card that was compared to a leafblower, because it needed a centrifugal turbine to stay cool.
- wildly different motherboards
So including the VGA card _and_ PSU _and_ HDD in when you say "the P4 will actually draw 179 watts" is actually just false.
And then using it as "marketting delta" and extrapolating it to mobile CPUs, just shows that you don't even start to have a clue WTF you're talking about. "Marketting delta"? Since when did a _NVidia_ graphics card's power use count as AMD or Intel "marketting delta"? No, really. Does any AMD or Intel CPU come with a NVidia GPU on the die, or what?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
WHOOPS - huge typo! My point still stands - 5 hours is much, much better than 3. But yeah, this puts it on par with what, mobile P3?
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
I'm having a great time sitting here (drinking my coffee, waiting for a compile to finish) reading all these comments from AMD whiners about how it's just not fair, dammit.
It's a fucking processor. Go do something useful.
This guy is making an outrageous claim. I have a brand new 12in powerbook, 12in iBook, 14in iBook, and 15in PB... none of them get over 4.5 hours when idle...
Your ignorance is infinitely greater than you realize.
Giving up my mod points here but seriously this is a non story.
The AMD's system configuration is using the Radeon Xpress 200 chipset so it is using an integrated graphics chipset with only 32 dedicated (64 shared). (See the link in original article to the AMD system information) AMD does not make a chipset with integrated video so how is it that their choice of an ATI solution, a low end one at that, is unreasonable?
AMD chose a 2ghz Turion vs a 2ghz Centrino (with latest chipset @ 533mhz), same amount of RAM, same hard drive, and otherwise a very similar configuration.
The criticism of the Turion being unable to match the Ultra Low Voltage Centrino's is also B.S. The ULVs run at less than 1.2ghz they are not in the same performance league.
I am running an IBM Thinkpad T41 with a Centrino (1.4ghz), and I'm impressed with it a great deal. But when two different CPU architectures are being compared there is only so much you can do to ensure a common configuration, looking at the configurations that was attempted and the comparison was not 'fiddled with' as The Reg is implying. The article on the whole is media hyperbole.
I've watched two DVD movies back to back on my Pentium-M laptop while in an airport waiting on a flight (that was running late).
You might want to use the right part numbers when you go an speculate like this. So far, all of the parties have been wrong. It's not negligible, nor is it quite as large as others have stated. Looking up Intel's stated figures from ftp://download.intel.com/design/mobile/datashts/30 526401.pdf, on page 294, we find that the mainline mobile chip, the 915GM has a stated max TDP of 6W. So, if we assume for a moment that they're 100% accurate on this (I know, I know, just bear with me here...) then the aggregate TDP for the CPU and Northbridge is 33W for the Pentium-M model they tested- IF AMD used a laptop with this model setup. If they used a laptop with the "high-performance" chipset, it's liable to be higher. Now, that means that it's largely a push on peak consumption- it boils down to how well they idle back and how often when they're not idled back they're burning the peak power.
Keep in mind that all the other components, such as floppies, DVD drives, etc. consume power and they seriously contribute to the overall run-time of a laptop.
Was it cooking the reviews? Probably not, in reflection. Personally, I wish that the Reg author that made the article of the discussion subject would get some balls and find some integrity because he's pretty much wrong on most of what he wrote about.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
We have some on computers at work. They lag to high hell even running a decent opengl screensaver . Same screensaver runs fine on a cheap desktop with integrated SIS video (not notably well accelerated either).
The only thing Extreme about the Intel graphics cards is the lag... definately not comparable to a decent Radeon. Another laptop has an older radeon-mobile chipset and the screensavers work fine on that, too... though it's a lesser machine otherwise.
a biased hack of an article... 1. although the comparison may not be exactly apples to apples it is a. of comparable machines, the ATI mobility radeon Xpress 200 is not high end graphics (uses shared memory as well). granted it's obvious it is more capable than the intel graphics (when you see performance deltas of 100%s in graphics apps its usually not the CPU). b. not "fiddling" since the specs for both machines were listed in detail. 2. "If they had compared a 25 watt system and a lower power graphics controller, the numbers would be down a lot" - down a lot? what does that mean exactly? 3. "adding that Turion-powered systems could have up to one-third less battery life than laptops running on Intel's ultra low voltage products". talk about apples to oranges: ULV vs standard mobiles. besides 2/3 of the battery life of a pentium M ULV notebook isnt so bad (notice he said 1/3 less NOT 1/3 of). 4. assumption that battery life stinks, although the absense of any battery life benchmarks is suspicious, it is hardly proof that it is poor. having said that - like all other businesses, AMD undoubtebly tweaks benchmarks and results to attempt inflate the performance of their products. the article none the less is sensational bs.
Its needs all the 3d power it can get...
Look at what was actually benchmarked man. Office apps and synthetic tests... nothing specifically 3d intensive from what I saw...
As far as the rival processor goes they benched against what joe user (who judges performance based on GHZ not power usage. Or processor core technology.) would view as their primary alternative.
Actually, if you look at benchmarks on the fastest Pentium-M chip, they beat the high-end P4 quite consistantly.
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I looked at the benchmarks and they definitely *do not* beat the high-end P4's consistently.
The Pentium-M compares to the P4 much the same way that the old Cyrix chips compared to a Pentium- they do well on non-CPU intensive tasks such as Microsoft word and internet explorer, but the weak FPU hinders its raw performance in CPU hungry tasks. The Pentium-M's floating point performance is slightly better than half of the high end P4's.
When you design a chip to be low power, you have to make tradeoffs. Intel designed a pretty efficient chip that delivers good performance for the amount of wattage it consumes, but it shouldn't be confused with more powerful desktop chips. It does well in light applications that aren't really CPU hungry and won't bog the processor.
Anandtech did a pretty thorough review of the Pentium-M and how it compares to desktop chips.
"As a mobile processor, the Pentium M cannot be beat - we've actually seen why, even in this comparison today. With a highly power optimized architecture, the Pentium M continues to deliver performance that is competitive with other mobile CPUs on the market. The problem is that in the transition to the desktop world, its competitors get much more powerful, while the Pentium M is forced to live within its mobile constraints."
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
The explanation for focusing on performance instead of battery power may also be that nobody cares about battery time. I recently shopped for a notebook and it was nearly impossible to get any real numbers on battery lifetime, even more so if you want it in writing.
In the end I bought an Acer notebook. The vendor told me it would hold out about 60-90 minutes on battery and would probably not run Linux. I am now using it on Linux and have 4 to 5 hours of battery lifetime.
As long as people only care for performance and nobody cares about battery lifetime, you can't blame AMD for this benchmark focus.
The fact that there is no real benchmark to get a number for battery lifetime is probably important to remember here as well. Playing a DVD in full-screen is a good test, for example, but who knows if you could gain more battery lifetime if you moved more of the decoding in the CPU instead of the graphics chip? In the end it's also a driver issue. And what do I care how long battery life is under Windows!
3 hours 20 minutes. If you spend that much time on your laptop, you are in serious trouble my friend.
When I'm writing a major paper, I drain the battery almost completely each day. Most places I need to use it don't have plug-ins available.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
> The Register hardly fits the definition.
Ther is alot of personl opinion and biased cmmentary in Th Regster articles. It more tabloid than credible nws sorce.
Yup, if you used Intel Extreme graphics adapter you wouldn't be questioning this. You can literally see the UI redraws with it. Plus they could have used a WUXGA display which would make Intel graphics even slower.
...Heat shorts a processor.
Please, think of the processors!*
*Not a jab at Linux but a reference to the masturbate/God/kitten proverb and the temperature those chips can go...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
AMD still cheated though, comparing a 2 year old chip to their new chip. If AMD wanted to be fair they would have put their chip against the 760 Banias Chip instead of the outdated 750 chip. They also used CAS4 ram in the Intel laptop and CAS3 ram in the amd laptop. Intel box is running 915GMS chipset, and not PM version. PM version being the high performance version of the centrino chipset.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
they are comparing a 64 bit amd and a 32 bit intel. no suprise that the 64 runs faster, but it should be more then a high of 13%
http://www.npcgaming.com Dedicated Gaming Servers
Every other message on this topic was modded down, yet this is +5 informative??