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AMD Rips 'Biased and Unreliable' Intel-Optimized SYSmark Benchmark (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: AMD is making a stink about SYSMark, a popular benchmarking program that's been around for many years, and one the chip designer says is not reliable. Rather than provide meaningful results and information, AMD claims SYSMark unfairly favors Intel products and puts too much emphasis on strict CPU performance above all else. John Hampton, director of AMD's client computing products, explained in a video why SYSMark itself is an unreliable metric of performance. He even brought up the "recent debacle" involving Volkswagen as proof that "information provided by even the most established organizations can be misleading." Salinas says SYSMark's focus on the CPU is so "excessive" that it's really only evaluating the processor, not the system as a whole. In comparison, PCMark 8 probes not only the CPU, but graphics and subsystems as well. In an attempt to drive the point home, AMD ran a set of custom scripts it developed based on Microsoft Office and timed how long it took each system to complete them. The Intel system took 61 seconds to finish the benchmark versus 64 seconds for the AMD platform, a difference of about 6-7 percent and in line with what PCMark 8 indicated, though Sysmark shows a stark delta of 50 percent in favor of Intel with comparable CPUs.
If I benchmark a common office task, like typing War and Peace into Microsoft Word, I find that these new processors run no faster than an old IBM PC/XT with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The real outrage should be that operations in Microsoft Office are measured in seconds and minutes instead of nanoseconds and milliseconds.
Well every time you type a key it must send it online for anonymous data collection, match it against a dictionary for instant grammar correction, save a copy of your modified file to your OneDrive online free storage space, run a few ticks into Clippy's neural network, send your typing statistics to Cortana, pass through 10 layers of automation & scripting support interfaces & abstractions ...
Ah and yes, eventually also update the output buffer with actual letter symbol to be displayed on the screen!