ZDNet Says AMD Posts Blatantly Deceptive Benchmark 180
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."
Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Companies will continue to tout themselves as top dogs, regardless of the facts. And it never ceases to amaze me how far they go to stretch the truth in order to make themselves look good.
How else could salesmen go into a room and pitch their product? Or how can manufacturers sell their AMD products when competitors are pushing Intel? And vice versa? Its capitalism at its best.
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think it can get worse? You don't think it would get worse if there weren't people crying foul at the current comparisons?
You can use legitimate comparisons to tout a product, you don't have to unfairly match them. Look at your average car commercial (fictional example):
Ford's new truck gets better gas mileage than Dodge.
Ford's new truck has a bigger, more powerful engine than Chevy.
They just said it's better than Dodge and Chevy, but in two completely different ways. They do this all the time in marketing. If nothing else, AMD could talk up price points and power efficiency, two things they almost always have over Intel. Skewed benchmarks just make the company look inept and leave knowledgeable consumers feeling like AMD is insulting their intelligence.
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The skewed numbers for Intel's chip are also because the chart for Intel was compiled with different settings
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You must be new here. Welcome to
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Who the manufacturer compares against is of course up to them, and there's nothing "unfair" about it. It's telling the world that this is the competition they strive to beat. If it's an older CPU, the new CPU is obviously intended as a replacement for these. If I had a large server farm running these Xeons, I'd be most interested to see this benchmark, well before the CPUs actually come out (if they're already out on the market, they will be off the market by the time upper management approves the budget). And remember, AMD and Intel aren't in the game to try to trick you to buy a CPU that won't work well for you -- they want you to return for your CPU needs, over and over again. That's why they publish benchmarks like these, which are relevant, just not to the GP.
Other comparisons both will and do appear once a CPU has hit the market. But for the initial pre-release vendor benchmarks, I'd rather it be the choice of the vendor, so we can see where the market position is going to be.
Move along -- nothing to see here, except for a particularly silly submission.
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No, I'm far from a fanboy. And no, I didn't miss that part. In fact, I explained why they compare the unreleased CPU to an older Intel CPU, and why that makes sense. Apparently you either skipped this, or didn't understand it, so I guess I have to get a silver spoon and bib for you:
When a CPU hasn't been released yet, what's i
Perhaps (Score:4, Informative)
You think AMD cares about Slashdot? (Score:2)
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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
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
Cause I can't see a single lie. Self-flattery, yes, and selective truths, yes, but no lies.
If you're in the business (and if you're not, this type of benchmark isn't meant for you), you know very well how to read and interpret the reported benchmarks and marketese. It's the expected format, which is helpful to those who need to know these things, e.g. because they are planning on upgrading a large Xeon farm to faster CPUs at as low cost as possible, or because they're a large OEM who needs to know the market segment this CPU is intended for, so they know both how much to order and how to market it.
Can we all stop this lynch mob now?
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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
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
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You can imply a lot of things that are completely untrue without saying a single lie.
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:4, Insightful)
Really? You have a very strange definition of "lying", then. I think it shows how good a replacement the new CPU would be compared to the older one, but what do I know?
How is it misleading? It's a very good indicator on whether the future CPU would be a good replacement for the old CPU, and that is useful information to many -- both large companies and OEMs. The only misleading here seems to be people misleading themselves into thinking the benchmark is for a different purpose than it is.
Me, myself and I. I refuse to join a lynch mob without thinking things through first.
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http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&safe=
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Hm, what a nice example of self-fulfilling prophecy.
I prefer another one though: accept Intel and AMD's benchmarks should be accurate to utmost detail, and put up a riot every time we see they aren't.
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I don't think the accuracy of the benchmarks is in question here.
The deceptive manor in which the benchmark data was presented is the issue. Which is really a none issue. This is advertisement, anybody who doesn't look critically at data presented by the manufacturere is really gullible.
Anybody who doesn't look critically at the data from a third party is pretty gullible
I really really don't see the problem here
Re:Who trusts a vendor's benchmarks anyway? (Score:5, Insightful)
That logic gets you into trouble...
Politician promises are always considered untrustworthy, so I don't see what the big deal is.
Auto companies are untrustworthy, so you should expect the brakes to fail.
People are untrustworthy, so if you are robbed, it's your fault for carrying cash.
People are killed every day, so I don't see what the big deal with Iraq is.
etc.
Sheesh...wrong is wrong, no matter who is doing it. If you don't fight it, you're part of the problem.
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Wrong is subjective, depending on who is interpreting it. To state otherwise is to be the cause of the problem.
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I can smell the desperation (Score:2, Insightful)
Not the architecture.. (Score:2)
Intel does, however, have a faster processor design than AMD's released product. If Barcelona levels the field in terms of instructions per clock, then the ball is back to Intel's court to at least meet AMDs memory/SMP/IO architecture or offset that deficiency with another leap in the processor technology. I hear Intel's roadmap eventually brings in
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In the broader sense of an 'architecture' in my mind, AMDs has a more advanced one than Intel (the integrated and hypertransport IO/multi-processor strategy).
Then it seems your mind needs an update. Intel's Core 2 architecture is significantly better than AMD's current or past (and seemingly future) architectures.
Putting all the fanboy drivel aside for a moment;
Intel's processors are faster without using more transistors, indications that the architecture is more optimized and makes better use of the available transistors.
Intel's processors scale vastly better than AMD's offerings both current and future.
Also consider, the die shrink to 65nm for AMD
Re:Not the architecture.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not entirely fair to say Intel is ahead of AMD architecturally. Both architectures have their strengths and weaknesses. At the moment, Intel are getting better overall performance (which means performance per Watt these days), but their architecture does have a few issues.
Re:Not the architecture.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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You mean a processor that does more and offers rock solid performance versus and overclocked rig that needs rebooting every few hours?
Parent has an odd notion of what scaling is, although technically that would be considering scaling up when the general industry trend is scaling out. My database and web servers are Opteron based for good reason, exactly the ones you specified. Seems a shame AMD not being able to keep up on the lower end of things but they really aren't challenged by Intel in the mid-range
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Chill out, man. The Parent didn't have any fanboyism at all, but your post is full of it.
Intel's processors are faster without using more transistors, indications that the architecture is more optimized and makes better use of the available transistors.
The Core2 has almost 2x the transistor count of the Athlon X2, due to the huge cache. Or do you mean logic transistors? I can't find numbers for those. (Not that using more transistors would necessarily speed t
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AMD has a dedicated interconnect between processors, and a seperate memory bus for each processor, so adding an additional processor effectively doubles your memory bandwidth with a NUMA aware OS.
Intel on the other hand, effectively halves it's per processor memory bandwidth each time the processor count is doubled. The shared bus has to be shared for everything, inter-processor communication, memory access and IO device access. Also, their quad core
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-Rick
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In the 8 or more core server market AMD is still the better choice.
On the desktop AMDs X2 3800s are a great choice for about 95% of the market.
Where Intel really is dominating is the Laptop market. That is an extremely important market that AMD just can not seem to do well in.
As to wanting AMD to fail. Good greif I hope not. If Intel didn't have AMD we would still have P4s and be paying through the noise for them!
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correction (Score:2)
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I choose AMD for the price... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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Also, AMD may not quite be the absolute fastest, but last I looked on Newegg (around last week) they certainly were the cheapest. And I don't mean only the processor was cheapest - each time I spec out parts for a motherboard/cpu/RAM/etc (that is, using a minimum standard of manufacture and processor class being Athlon/whatever Intel's equi
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Now that Intel got their act together and are cleaning AMDs clock its "They are cheaper / a better value / more bang per buck."
AMD dropped their prices because of the performance differential.
They both make great stuff these days and are pushing each other to higher standards. Buy what you want or need but lets not pretend alot of this isnt just blatant fanboyism.
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So while AMD has cheaper processors that doesn't mean they are a better bang for the buck. To be honest if you have no use for the performance then just buy a used system of some sort.
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Years ago when i built my ubercool mod boxes i could not decide on Intel vs AMD...so i built one of each
Glad i got 4 years+ out of those boxes with only 1
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I question their management in the wake of the ATI purchase, but I'm not the one with 35 years of competing against Intel under my belt.
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If you are purely a consumer, yes. If you want to ensure the continuation of the competition that lead to the current cheap Core 2 Duo vs. Athlon 64 X2 battle, you need to factor that in to the equation too. Otherwise, we'll be back to the days of paying through the nose for overpriced Pentium x shite.
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The best price/performance at the moment is the AMD 3600. From there, the price performance ratios get progressively worse as performance increases. Other processors that aren't blatantly obsolete include: The AMD 5000, Intel 4300, AMD 5600, and a bunch of Intel processors costing over $200.
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Sorry... "obsolete" wasn't the right word. I was looking for "superseded by better deals".
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You shouldn't replace something you already have with something that isn't any better. Who is suggesting you do that? That would be a pretty stupid thing to do. Someone that has the Core 2 Duo would also be stupid to replace the system for an Athlon 64 of the same speed, both ways, it's spending money to get no improvement.
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I'd kind of like to know where you are pricing processors. I bought a low end core 2 duo processor that beat the AMD processor on performance at the same price in a Dell computer. Maybe if you are making your own box, but whatever. The prices aren't that different. In
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Mid to high end AMD SLI Chip sets are the same price as low to mid end intle chipsets.
It's not the deceptive benchmarks that bother me (Score:4, Interesting)
What a great job.
Re:It's not the deceptive benchmarks that bother m (Score:3, Insightful)
As someone who once worked for a company producing a product that had major hardware issues (as well as some fairly significant software bugs) yet
This is surprising? (Score:2, Informative)
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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
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trust? (Score:2, Redundant)
Yeah, But Ou Loudly Beat's Intel's Drum (Score:2, Informative)
That being said, yes, these are vendor benches, which we all know are a scam. At the same time, the anti-AMD guy shouldn't be blowing the whistle and crying 'foul'; it makes him look like a whiner.
What a load of lying malarkey (Score:2, Insightful)
If AMD was comparing one architecture to another, they MUST do so based on identical core clock to memory clock ratios.
So what are the ratios in question, ZDNet? <pull string> "Math is hard."
Then the ZDNet jerkoff has the gall to complain that AMD didn't use the latest SPEC.org numbers. Well, duh. RUNNING benchmarks means just that: running them. You get the actual machines you want to compare, scrupulously make all the software as identical as possible, and let 'em rip. You DO NOT just grab
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That sounds like a really good idea... Why don't someone make one, and call it SPEO or something?
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You don't understand how SPEC works, do you? It's *not* a benchmark you just download an
I'm Totally Shocked! (Score:2, Interesting)
I only left Intel out because I'm typing this on a Core 2 and I'm scared that if I point out the n
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Deceptive Benchmarks? (Score:2)
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In this case, we want redundant (which I'm sure I'll get modded for this), not oxymoron.
:-P
An oxymoron would be something like "government intelligence" or "a little pregnant". Now, "Honest benchmark" when given by the vendor might be an oxymoron, "deceptive benchmark" is just a needless qualifier.
Some links to brush up on here [oxymoronlist.com] and here [wikipedia.org]
Cheers
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Some days it's best if I'm not given sharp objects, I swear.
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The Only Benchmark that Matters for Most folks (Score:2)
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"Coup de grâce"
Let's all scream FIRE! (Score:5, Informative)
The graphs are from a several months old marketing promo. Suddenly there's really no story.
Claim: AMD listed a product they don't intend to release.
Truth: AMD listed a product they intended to release at the time but subsequently withdrew.
Claim: AMD deliberately used out of date Intel scores.
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.
Claim: AMD ignored the most recent Intel processor releases.
Truth: Those Intel processors weren't released at the time of writing and no benchmarks existed.
Journalistically, this is about on a par with finding footage from the 50's saying we'd all be driving flying cars by the year 2000 and boldly asserting there's clearly a government conspiracy to hide the technology from the people to protect big oil.
Bold claims are one thing. Making them on the back of badly researching where the information came from is a great way to look like an idiot.
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from the summary (i refuse to read ZDNet articles):
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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 imp
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After the whole OS X 'hacked in sixty seconds' fiasco, it appears he's still a gutter journalist.
Still, to his credit he at least has a document to show everyone this time. That's a big step up for him.
If only... (Score:2)
Comparison points (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm interested in a side-by-side comparison at three points:
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"This is more a techie thing, gives me an idea of which company's wringing the most from each clock cycle in their chips. "
This means almost nothing with todays chips. A well designed 2.5Ghz would be a better chip than a poorly designed 3GHz. what about duel/quad/infintium core chips?
Nobody is going to release a chip that isn't pushing comparable cycles anymore.
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Price points based on what? dollar to Hz? Dollar to power consumed? Straight Dollar to dollar?
Straight dollars. Essentially, if I spend $300, how much performance will that buy me from each company?
A well designed 2.5Ghz would be a better chip than a poorly designed 3GHz. what about duel/quad/infintium core chips?
Which is why I noted in that item that it's not a reliable guide for buying chips. There's a lot of things that affect performance anymore, FSB speed, FSB architecture, memory subsystem, cac
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Mips per watt
Processor X uses 100 watts, produces 3000 MIPS and costs $500
Processor Y uses 50 watts, produces 2800 MIPS and costs $200
etc..
Or use mflops if that floats your boat.
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Comparison By Price (Score:2)
WSJ ads are from april (Score:3, Informative)
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Xeon X5365 - not yet available ? (Score:2)
The ZDNet blogger claims that Intel's XEON X5365 3.0 GHz quad-core CPU shipped back in April. However I can't find it in the current Intel pricelist [intel.com], neither at any of the popular online retailers. Only a bunch of hardware websites have been able to review this processor. It looks like its not yet available to the general public. Am I missing something ?
Wherefore art thou FactCheck? (Score:2)
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But the fact is that these new cpu's coming out from AMD look like they're going to be the best on the market.
The best for what purpose? I evaluate chips based upon speed, price, power consumption, reliability, and "bonus features" with my needs in mind. Looking at the numbers, AMD is not winning the high end for speed, even with their next round of updates compared to Intel's current offerings. Power consumptions seems like a wash, or even a little bit in Intel's favor as well. I don't see any "bonus features" I care about in the revisions likely to ship in the next 6 months. So that pretty much leaves price, wh
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Well, statistically, all other things being equal (which I'm sure you would not agree they are) it's much more likely that a new processor like Barcelona, which is in it's early steppings will have more errata than a processor architecture that has been shipping for a year and has gone through several steppings. Be careful of the comparisons you ask for.