AMD Rejects SYSmark Benchmark

Deathspawner writes "In an unusual move, Advanced Micro Devices has issued a press release rejecting its endorsement for the industry recognized benchmark SYSmark 2012. Developed by BAPCo and backed by industry heavyweights such as Dell, Intel and Hewlett-Packard, AMD has stated that BAPCo both has tuned SYSmark to create bias in favor of its competitor, and that its benchmarks are not relevant for the audience it targets. Also noted is a complete lack of heterogeneous CPU+GPU testing. Techgage tears apart AMD's claims to see if they are valid, while also evaluating the overall usefulness of SYSmark and the impact it can have on consumers."

Comments

Intel's compilers

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Quite a bit of Windows software is compiled using Intel's compilers, and they are intentionally made to sabotage performance on AMD chips. When looking at CPUID, instead of checking the features they want, they look for that _and_ the CPU being "GenuineIntel", and if not, the code chooses the worst possible implementation. This includes some major scientific math libraries and a part of popular benchmarks.