ZDNet Says AMD Posts Blatantly Deceptive Benchmark

Glasswire writes "George Ou, writing in ZDNet's Real World IT blog, accuses AMD of comparing processors the company will not be shipping for months (2.6GHz Barcelona quad core) with older Intel Xeon quad cores rather than currently shipping ones which would beat the (hypothetical) score AMD claims for the future Barcelona. I guess while even the much slower 2.0GHz Barcelona is due soon AMD didn't think results from the 2.0 would look good enough — even against the slower Xeons they picked. Maybe the right comparison should be either best cpu against best cpu — or compare ones at the same price — and only shipped products."

Comments

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[Applekid]

Thing is, if the new CPU truly is the next greatest thing since shaved ice, they wouldn't need to be deceptive. They'd use fair and unbiased benchmarks and their CPU will float to the top.

The deceptive benchmark is indicative of one thing: the new CPU blows. Otherwise it wouldn't be needed.

What I would be concerned about is whether this was put forth by the marketing teams to cover up a costly R&D backtrack or it was put forth by the lead engineering groups to save their butts from the fire from the executives since they wouldn't know a good CPU if it burned them in the butt*.

* Not a direct attack on executives since, by definition, they're there to RUN a business and not actually develop FOR the business, so, knowing a good CPU is simply out of scope and their only references are what their employees tell them.