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BAPCo calls 'liar, liar' on AMD, Intel still its golden prince
Benchmarks can be a bit of a back and forth schoolyard screaming match -- there's plenty of yelling, but not always much brute force to back it up -- so let's take this case of 'he said / she said' with an even coarser grain of salt. BAPCo, a non-profit whose members include major tech industry heavyweights, slapped back at AMD today for publicly dissing the SYSmark 2012 benchmark it had an 80 percent hand in creating and for claming the group forced them out of the club. The chip maker had similar beef back in 2007 over Intel's benchmark-friendlier chips, and this appears to be the final straw that broke its GPU's back. On Monday, VIA and NVIDIA also joined the ranks of the recently defected, but refrained from any superfluous PR finger-wagging. Wherever the truth may lie, for sure someone's got a case of the green-eyed monster, and it's definitely not us. We're looking at you, AMD. [Thanks, Muhammad; image courtesy BAPCo]
AMD resigns from BAPCo consortium, denounces SYSmark 2012 benchmark
It's not uncommon for a company to make a public endorsement from time to time, but AMD today drafted a press release to announce that it's not endorsing a product -- BAPCo's SYSmark 2012 benchmark -- going so far as to drop out of the non-profit org to drive its point home. AMD claims that it attempted to work with BAPCo to focus testing on real-world usage, rather than traditional benchmarks that don't necessarily represent how we use computers today. Nigel Dessau, AMD's CMO, explains the decision on AMD's blog: "Unfortunately, our good intentions were met with an outcome that we believe does a disservice to the industry and our customers. We weren't able to effect positive change within BAPCo, and the resulting benchmark continues to distort workload performance and offers even less transparency to end users. Once again, BAPCo chose to ignore the opportunity to promote openness and transparency." The biggest issue appears to be that SYSmark highlights processor speed while ignoring GPU power -- a significant flaw, considering GPUs now play a large role in overall system performance.
