Courtesy of the inquirer (
www.inquirer.net)
AMD accused of blatant Geode benchmark abuse
Via is the victim in unseemly row
By INQUIRER staff: Thursday 30 September 2004, 18:01
THE EDITOR OF the Microprocessor Report has lit out aginst AMD for using the Embedded Processor Rating System (EPRS) to downplay various Via C3 processors.
In an editorial heralding next week's Fall Processor Forum, Kevin Krewell, editor-in-chief of the MP, claimed that AMD's Geode marketing team used the EPRS to rationalise a processor number scheme to position its products against some Via C3 products.
Krewell said: "We believe AMD used the benchmarks as a blatant market positioning tool".
According to Krewell, AMD has argued that using frequency to compare Geodes with Via chips isn't valid, hence its use of EPRS. Benchmarking controversies, he said, may well be the result of marketing departments manipulating the market.
Some wags, he says, even call benchmarking benchmarketing.
He points out some chip architectures - he cites Intel's Netbust architecture - have "wildly exaggerated pipeline lengths" giving a 2GHz Pentium M a better SPECint2000_base score than a 3.6GHz Pentium 4.
The upshot of the editorial is that some supposedly rational people are going to argue the toss at a panel discussion at the Fall Processor forum on Wednesday - and that's likely to be pretty controversial.
Full details of the agenda for the forum, held in the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, Dullsville, California, can be found here. µ
