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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.
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. . .
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'.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
There is the Apple G4 where power consuption is 10W and battery life 6h.
It does contain the memory controller. There does not exist an AMD64 chip without one. It's an integral part of the design.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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?
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.