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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."
Comparing a product that I (may) produce, 4 months from now, to one that someone else, did produce, 4 months ago, in a rapidly changing market, to imply that "My chips are better than their chips" is lying.
To say "oh, selective truths to imply an untruth" isn't lying, is to play a stupid, and harmful semantic game.
This isn't a lynch mob. It is people pointing out that AMD is lying in their use of the "expected" format, to say something, which isn't true (our chips outperform their chips).
It is people saying "we are tired of people abusing our trust, and using bad numbers to imply things which are false".
To say "well, they aren't saying anything which isn't true, my future chips do outperform their former chips" is disingenuous. It may be, literally true, but the implications of that graph are misleading and therefore a lie.
This isn't helpful to some buyer, as it doens't compare two comparable items. My not yet released chips, are not comparable to their old chips. That you suggest something else, makes me wonder who you are writing for.