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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.
SYSMark has been known to be not particularly representative of actual performance for quite some time. In particular, they seem weirdly sensitive to memory latency, way beyond its actual impact, yet they deliberately evade caching even in benchmarks measuring something where caching is normally useful. And they do seem to unreasonably penalize AMD chips, although I'm not sure if that's malice or simple incompetence.
The review sites I frequent tend to use PCMark for the general-overview synthetic benchmarks, along with some actual-program benchmarks (usually compression, crypto, and video encode). I of course prefer the latter - nobody runs synthetic benchmarks in production, it's always some actual application. The closer you can get to benchmarking that actual app, the better.
The real outrage should be that operations in Microsoft Office are measured in seconds and minutes instead of nanoseconds and milliseconds.
I agree with AMD that most of the market is slanted towards Intel.
But I don't want a benchmark score that is dictated by a graphics card and it's driver set. I want a cpu score that is based on CPU performance, only CPU performance and perhaps taking into account the effects of memory memory bandwidth. Plenty of tools on the internet for that they could have showed instead.
What I want from AMD is a cpu in the 150$~ range with a performance equal or exceeding my old overclockedi5-2500k (2011 vintage) and be capable of gnarly overclocking. If they can deliver that, they have me for an entire socket generation.
The reality is for desktop and gaming workloads AMD's upper shelf products really are a better value. You will get a lot more value putting the savings on the processor/chipset into other system components like a little faster SSD or another 4GB of memory. The performance delta between Intel and AMD looks bigger in some of the benchmarks than it is in real world applications. The vast majority of desktop/laptop PC users don't benefit from Intel's premiums and lets call it superior "strait line performance" as for most applications the situation is I/O bound.
Which is NOT at all to say that if you have more specific workloads like you do a lot video processing, certain types of simulations, etc not to pick Intel.
If you are just getting a PC to do "generically everything and anything" with the A-series systems are a great value. If you have little more to spend FX + discrete video is still probably a better value than an equivalent i3/5 + video on the Intel side. If you really need an i7 for something than by all means get an i7.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Having to pay money to remove corruption in an established organization is not the definition of ethical business in the first place.
That's called the old extortion/thug plan "pay up for protection".
BAPco deserves $0 from anyone, especially if they have a problem discriminating against people who don't give them omney.
My work desktop is AMD, my home fileserver is AMD, and both my parent's desktops are AMD. That's because in those use cases, AMD is "good enough". Web browsing and email don't require a lot of horsepower.
That said, my gaming/transcoding PC is an Intel i5-4690, because AMD's top line CPU can barely compete with Intel's I3 line. CMT didn't pan out, and they've been held hostage by TSMC/GloFo's failure to produce a sub-28nm lithographic process.
I love AMD's engineers, they have some impressively smart people working for them, and I hope Zen + 16nm heralds a new beginning for them. But today, they aren't "competitive", merely "good enough".
Well, yes, because each keypress in current versions of ms word triggers several megabytes worth of code to execute, probably inside a CLR (because somehow this makes everything better). 'Progress' is now defined by getting gigaflop spec cpus to mimic the same laggy performance we got from 286s back in the day.
Rule 1 (good to a first approximation): All benchmarks are meaningless.
Rule 2 (for experts only): Every benchmark measures something very specific. A benchmark is only meaningful if you know exactly what it is measuring, and the thing it measures is something you actually care about.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."