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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."
Isn't Battery Life the main reason one would pay a premimum for a Pentium-M? If you want a fast laptop with a shite battery, there's plenty out there.
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
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'.
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.
I think you meant Acrobat you want to boycott, not pdf. Xpdf loads the document in a snap for me.
Real programmers don't comment their code. It was hard to write, it should be hard to understand.
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
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)
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.
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.
That may sound "rational" but in 64-bit mode you get more registers and the core is more efficient [hint: think more idle time]. So in reality you spend less time doing regular stuff such as handling interupts, handling a filesystem, decoding network packets, etc...
... 28C [about 8C over ambient].
... etc....
My NewCastle 3200+ sits idling at 1Ghz most of the day [except when issuing a build or playing a game] and roasts at a blistering
My P4 [Northwood 2.8Ghz] would idle at a reduced clockrate (as low as cpuspeedy would allow) around 35C [15C over ambient].
Similarly on the laptop front... my Athlon XP-M and my brothers Pentium M [both Compaq Presario series, his 2 years newer than mine] get the SAME battery life at idle.
What they're missing over and over and over again is that screen, motherboard components, memory, hard disks consume a chunk of power. So "small" boosts in cpu efficiency usually don't translate to huge battery life extensions...
What they really should test are things like
1. How many times you can build a kernel [from fresh] on battery life before it dies.
2. How many minutes of HL2 can you run through a demo.
3. How long you can run a "MS Word" style demo [e.g. adding text, inserting things]....
That would show off "efficiency" since the more you can do the better. Who cares if the laptop will live for 98 hours if it takes you 7 hours to build a kernel or inserting a 12KB clipart takes 45 minutes...
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
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.
And clearly those Office performance benchmarks benefit greatly due to the ATI GPU ... or those Digital media applications. Since everyone knows that Word uses Direct3d to render text onto the screen....
But again, this whole article involves interviewing a Gartner analyst, and as far as I'm concerned Gartner lacks credibility.
Plus, no one should ever trust the benchmarks from the manufacturer. Anyone with half a brain has realized this years ago.
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.
Still, as you say 27+6=33W and this is very near 35W . We will see if Intel need only 2W to add the 64 bits feature to an old P3 desing...
Sounds to me like the laptop benchmarks should be to pull the AC power line and measure:
1. Total digits of pi calculated.
2. Total seconds of mp3 encoded.
3. Total minutes of DVD played.
4. Total number of frames rendered in some 3D project.
etc.
Then we don't fight over how many watts this model uses and the various tradeoffs involved. If it uses less power it will have more time to work. If it goes faster it will get more done in less time. Give the consumer all the numbers and he can figure out whether he'd rather have a laptop that is good and encoding mp3s or one which will last a long time spinning DVDs.