Slashdot Mirror
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."
From the comments on the original article:
The graphs are from a several months old marketing promo. Suddenly there's really no story.
Claim: AMD listed a product they don't intend to release.
Truth: AMD listed a product they intended to release at the time but subsequently withdrew.
Claim: AMD deliberately used out of date Intel scores.
Truth: AMD used the most current Intel scores available at the time. Improved scores came from an improved compiler - which may well change AMD's scores too. Either way, it wasn't available at the time of writing.
Claim: AMD ignored the most recent Intel processor releases.
Truth: Those Intel processors weren't released at the time of writing and no benchmarks existed.
Journalistically, this is about on a par with finding footage from the 50's saying we'd all be driving flying cars by the year 2000 and boldly asserting there's clearly a government conspiracy to hide the technology from the people to protect big oil.
Bold claims are one thing. Making them on the back of badly researching where the information came from is a great way to look like an idiot.