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

Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[nweaver]

Vendor benchmarks are always considered untrustworthy, so I don't see what the big deal is.

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.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[CatsupBoy]

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

Or the amount of crap product comparisons will continue to be the same no matter how much its pointed out.

Companies will continue to tout themselves as top dogs, regardless of the facts. And it never ceases to amaze me how far they go to stretch the truth in order to make themselves look good.

How else could salesmen go into a room and pitch their product? Or how can manufacturers sell their AMD products when competitors are pushing Intel? And vice versa? Its capitalism at its best.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[mgoheen]

> Vendor benchmarks are always considered untrustworthy, so I don't see what the big deal is.

That logic gets you into trouble...

Politician promises are always considered untrustworthy, so I don't see what the big deal is.

Auto companies are untrustworthy, so you should expect the brakes to fail.

People are untrustworthy, so if you are robbed, it's your fault for carrying cash.

People are killed every day, so I don't see what the big deal with Iraq is.

etc.

Sheesh...wrong is wrong, no matter who is doing it. If you don't fight it, you're part of the problem.

Let's all scream FIRE!

[nick_davison]

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.

Re:Not the architecture..

[TheRaven64]

Intel's Core 2 architecture is significantly better than AMD's current or past (and seemingly future) architectures In some ways, yes. The micro-op fusion stuff is incredibly shiny. They took some good branch prediction logic from NetBurst, and have a lot of neat tricks internally, particularly in the cache controller. On the edge of the CPU, AMD have the lead. They have a better interconnect (they are going to lose this lead soon, once Intel get CSI out of the door), and they have more intelligent memory controllers, which give them the edge in virtualisation and a few other things.

It's not entirely fair to say Intel is ahead of AMD architecturally. Both architectures have their strengths and weaknesses. At the moment, Intel are getting better overall performance (which means performance per Watt these days), but their architecture does have a few issues.

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.