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."

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.

I choose AMD for the price...

[Spy der Mann]

i'm really not that interested in benchmarks. Besides my personal position is that AMD are the "good guys" and Intel are the "bad guys" because of their monopolistic practices.

It's kinda hard when you see your "heroes" do bad things, and I feel tempted to give excuses. In any case, the news won't make me trade my 3800+ dual core Athlon 64 for an intel Core 2 duo of the same speed and have to pay twice the price.

It's not the deceptive benchmarks that bother me

[realmolo]

What REALLY upsets me is the fact that the writers at ZDNet actually get *paid* to regurgitate data they likely found on some other website via Google.

What a great job.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[yfarren]

The point is, someone is lying.

While it may be the case that marketers generally lie, that is something to be opposed.

When people lie, when people disseminate false information, it harms the public. That people do so a lot simply means that they are hurting the public a lot. To say "Well, everyone harms the public, why is it a big deal that this person is harming the public" is to say it is ok to harm the public.

It isn't. Lying, disseminating false information is harmful. If it is done a lot, that just means there is a lot of harm being done, and should be opposed by the public MORE strongly.

To become blase' about people who lie and mislead simply encourages people to lie and mislead. It means that someone who tells the truth wont actually be listened too, because "well everyone lies". Which makes it more difficult for someone who does tell the truth.

I would suggest you re-examine your values, and whoever modded you up should re-examine their values. Accepting lies as a Fait Accompli, and just assuming everyone lies, as opposed to holding liars accountable for the lies they tell, simply encourages liars, and makes it even harder for someone to tell the truth (which is often more expensive than lying), as they wont be believed anyway.

The Irony Is Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

So poor liddle Intel, the company that is the undisputed king of bogus benchmarking with their infamous SPEC compiler bullshit and a sickening array of other crap, is crying foul over someone else playing hardball?

Suck it up bitches. Don't dish it out if you can't take it right back Intel.

I'm Totally Shocked!

[smackenzie]

So, what you are trying to tell me is that some company called AMD is posting benchmarks using processors that won't ship for a while (ahem, Sun / Sony), probably using carefully selected benchmarks (ahem, Apple / Motorola / IBM / Sony), and probably bragging about certain carefully selected synthetic results (ahem, Apple / Sony / IBM / Motorola) in carefully selected applications (ahem, ENTIRE FAB INDUSTRY).

I only left Intel out because I'm typing this on a Core 2 and I'm scared that if I point out the numerous times they have done something similar then my computer will crap out on me.

Now, having said this, can we all admit that AMD seems to have lost quite a bit of their edge recently?

Re:This is surprising?

[edremy]

I saw a lot of comments about that on the talkback section

Perhaps you'd like to actually address the complaint? Seemed pretty solid to me- Intel has used the best available, hard-to-cheat-on benchmark out there (SPEC) and gotten results. AMD is posting old results for Intel, results for AMD processors that don't exist yet and ignoring the best possible Intel products. Yes, it's advertising, but it's pretty crappy advertising, bordering on the deliberately deceptive. I'm a longtime fan of AMD- my home machines are AMD, I own stock in AMD, but crap like this makes me think about selling. If AMD is this desperate, they are in serious crapola

Re:I can smell the desperation

[Phu5ion]

It takes time for either side to release a new arch. How many years was AMD smoking Intel before they came out with the Core 2 series? AMD fanboyism aside, the Core 2 is a very great platform, but you have to thank AMD for forcing Intel to step it up, otherwise we would be paying twice as much today for a chip that performs about as well as the old P3. Competition is good and I, for one, can't wait to see what AMD comes up with next.

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.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[arivanov]

Absolutely.

And the fact that the CPU is not going to hit the high street for 6 odd months does not mean that selected engineering samples cannot be clocked to the same frequency. So in fact, the test is most likely run on a real CPU. Even further, if it is shipping in 6 months to stores the engineering samples have to hit OEMs and major manufacturers now so they can verify their designs.

Oh, and by the way, both AMD and Intel do this all the time. Intel was publishing Core benchmarks for 3-6 months ahead of launches. If we dig around their site I bet that we are going to find at least one benchmark for a CPU that is yet to be officially released.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[cbreaker]

And, not ONLY all that, all of these enthusiast sites continually post overclocked benchmarks for these CPU's.

They used to do it with the Pentium 4 all the time; You'd see a currently available Athlon versus a currently available Pentium 4 in a bechmark chart, and next to it would be a 60% overclocked P4 that requires special cooling. Yet they'd always say "BUT The OverClocked one BLOWS AMD AWAY!"

Just because this is coming from a manufacturer doesn't make it any less valid, and I don't see why AMD has to go hunting for Intel's latest CPU with the same model number (but a different revision) just to keep things fair OUT of their favor.

Besides, all this SPECint and CPU benchmark crap is worthless anyways, unless all you do with your server is run scientific calculations. In real world SMP applications, such as heavy-use VMware servers or database servers with lots of I/O and RAM, the Opterons will always kick the crap out of the Intel boxes with the Northbridge bottleneck. HyperTransport is the key to actually USING all of those system resources.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[heinousjay]

wrong is wrong, no matter who is doing it

Wrong is subjective, depending on who is interpreting it. To state otherwise is to be the cause of the problem.

Re:Let's all scream FIRE!

[Wavicle]

Truth: AMD listed a product they intended to release at the time but subsequently withdrew.

This article references AMD's CURRENT MARKETING page on Barcelona performance.

Go to www.amd.com
->Processors
->Multi-core
->Products
->Barcelona
->Performance
(You may have to select language in there somewhere)

I don't see how calling AMD out on this is in any way inappropriate because they continue to use it.

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.

Are you trying to imply that AMD has had no reason to update their current performance page on Barcelona? I wonder why.

Truth: Those Intel processors weren't released at the time of writing and no benchmarks existed.

Has AMD fired its marketing department? I'm going to guess that the reason they have not updated their current literature is because the news isn't good.

Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway?

[logicnazi]

Actually the test results themselves say they were the result of internal simulations. Still, assuming they were done honestly, internal simulations are probably more accurate than test silicon.

The real story here is not that "AMD LIED." Parent comments are right that AMD did not make any false statements. They were, however, misleading but I would normally let that slide for advertising.

The story is that AMD slammed intel for being deceptive and turned around and did it themselves.