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?

[PFI_Optix]

If we don't point out every time they use blatantly unfair product comparisons, the amount of disinformation coming out of vendors will only increase. Even though very few people (just the fanboys) place any stock in AMD's or Intel's benchmarks, it's worth pointing out flaws like this to keep them as honest as we possibly can.

It's not the deceptive benchmarks that bother me

[realmolo]

What REALLY upsets me is the fact that the writers at ZDNet actually get *paid* to regurgitate data they likely found on some other website via Google.

What a great job.

Re:Not the architecture..

[Ambassador Kosh]

I definitely don't agree that the intel systems scale vastly better. Most of the 4+ way benchmarks I have see with 8 or more cores go to amd pretty handily, The more memory the benchmarks need to use the worse off it gets for intel. So for desktops and very small servers where IO is not very important Intel is currently ahead in pure performance. If you need to setup an 8 core db server with 32GB of ram I would definitely go with opterons.

AMD is definitely not losing on the higher end server stuff, they are losing on the gaming desktops though since the Core 2 is a faster chip. For business work you pretty much never need something very fast. Probably the 3600+ is overkill for just about any business task and it currently as the best value of any chip I know of.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[cbreaker]

And, not ONLY all that, all of these enthusiast sites continually post overclocked benchmarks for these CPU's.

They used to do it with the Pentium 4 all the time; You'd see a currently available Athlon versus a currently available Pentium 4 in a bechmark chart, and next to it would be a 60% overclocked P4 that requires special cooling. Yet they'd always say "BUT The OverClocked one BLOWS AMD AWAY!"

Just because this is coming from a manufacturer doesn't make it any less valid, and I don't see why AMD has to go hunting for Intel's latest CPU with the same model number (but a different revision) just to keep things fair OUT of their favor.

Besides, all this SPECint and CPU benchmark crap is worthless anyways, unless all you do with your server is run scientific calculations. In real world SMP applications, such as heavy-use VMware servers or database servers with lots of I/O and RAM, the Opterons will always kick the crap out of the Intel boxes with the Northbridge bottleneck. HyperTransport is the key to actually USING all of those system resources.