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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.
AMD actually left BAPCo in 2011, for this very reason: http://hothardware.com/news/am...
I hate to break it to you, but Intel's been cheating on benchmarks since the late 70's. There have been countless stories through the years about how their compilers and processors have detected that they're running Whetstone, or SPECmark or whatever, and done something out-of-band as a result. There have also been numerous attempts by them to game the benchmark standards themselves. Think the Volkswagon diesel cheat on steroids -- Intel is famous for it.
When you say you're buying Intel for performance, you're saying that you're really buying Intel for brand-name recognition.
Apparently, AMD was pissed off about SYSMark even when it used to be a member, and quit the organization in protest.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
To some degree that's because most of AMD's CPUs are still being fabbed on an older 28nm (or even 32nm) node, which Intel moved beyond almost four years ago. Right now Intel has such a leg up on them due to process differences that there's no way AMD can legitimately compete at the high-end. The best they can do is crank up the clock speed and use a more powerful cooler, but Intel is shipping chips on a 14nm node right now. That comes out to a 4x difference in transistor density.
AMD still provides really good value for a regular consumer machine, and with them finally having some CPUs on a newer process node (14nm supposedly based on Samsung tech) later this year they might even be able to compete with Intel at the higher end of the charts, though I doubt they'll nab any performance crowns.