Originally Posted by coffeetime 
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=567
After AMD admitted the bad news last week that their Barcelona product would be late and underwhelming on clock speed, the AMD propaganda machine has gone in to hyper drive with the latest salvo of blatantly deceptive benchmarks. After claiming to have the high-road on ethics, AMD showed hypocrisy on three separate occasions (one, two, and three). But this latest round of deceptive benchmarks is so outrageous that it’s criminal.
On AMD’s “Barcelona†performance page, AMD shows the following fictitious and outdated information. Apparently some of these misleading numbers are even showing up on Wall Street Journal advertisements.
* It’s fictitious since AMD doesn’t have a 2.6 GHz Barcelona quad-core CPU and they won’t even have it in September which is already late by AMD’s original timeline. The fastest Barcelona processor coming out in September is 2.0 GHz. It isn’t really clear when AMD will be able to ramp up the clock speed an extra 30% to get to 2.6 GHz but it most likely won’t be any time soon because processors don’t just ramp 30% over night.
* The numbers AMD posted for Intel’s XEON X5355 and X5160 have been outdated since April 2007 and you need a magnifying glass to see that disclaimer in the fine print on the bottom. The actual up-to-date SPEC.org certified scores for the two Intel products listed are significantly higher. It not like AMD can claim that they forgot to include the very latest scores which were just posted days ago, we’re talking months here so it’s a blatant omission.
* Intel’s XEON X5365 3.0 GHz quad-core CPU which shipped back in April was deliberately omitted from these results even though AMD showed off numbers for a 2.6 GHz Barcelona chip which doesn’t even have a launch date yet. Putting in 2.0 GHz Barcelona scores would be shady enough since the part hasn’t officially launched yet but including 2.6 GHz Barcelona scores is just outrageous.
Full picture on quad-core SPECint_rate2006 performance:
* Not real product. Fastest Barcelona being released in September is 2.0 GHz
As you can see from above, AMD’s claim that they have a 20% clock-for-clock advantage with Barcelona is simply wrong. Based on the latest certified SPEC.org results, AMD has a little more than a 1% clock-for-clock performance advantage in a dual-socket 8-core Server configuration but they have 50% clock speed deficit when the Barcelona finally launches in September. That means Barcelona will not be the Intel quad-core killer that AMD has been promising for most of this year and it won’t even be close.
Full picture on dual-core SPECint_rate2006 performance:**
The deception doesn’t end with the quad-cores; AMD is also claiming to have an advantage on dual-core processors when in fact they have a major performance deficit. AMD claims to have a 2.5% advantage when Intel actually has a 14.7% advantage when you’re looking at the certified SPEC.org scores.
** UPDATE 7/5/2007 - Hans de Vries pointed out in the talkback that the AMD 2222SE has newer scores. The newer results have been added to this chart.
I’ve seen benchmarks get cherry picked and twisted before but this is just outrageous. AMD is deliberately leaving out Intel’s best scores, leaving out Intel’s best products that shipped months ago, and putting in theoretical Barcelona scores for products that don’t even have a ship date. After Henri Richard (AMD executive) came in front of our ZDNet cameras to slam Intel for “un-ethical behavior†and promising not to do the same, we have caught them on four separate occasions behaving unethically. After this latest incident, it’s clear that AMD has no intention of behaving honestly or ethically.
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http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/323
ZDNet Technical Director calls shens on latest Barcelona performance figures
ZDNet's Technical Director, George Ou, has called the latest round of pre-release Barcelona performance data by AMD, blatantly deceptive, cherry-picked and simply wrong.
After the most recent round of performance data found its way out onto the web, where AMD compare a simulated 2.6GHz Barcelona quad-core processor to parts from Intel's quad-core Xeon product line, George has taken serious exception to the data.
"I’ve seen benchmarks get cherry picked and twisted before but this is just outrageous. AMD is deliberately leaving out Intel’s best scores, leaving out Intel’s best products that shipped months ago, and putting in theoretical Barcelona scores for products that don’t even have a ship date. After Henri Richard (AMD executive) came in front of our ZDNet cameras to slam Intel for “un-ethical behavior†and promising not to do the same, we have caught them on four separate occasions behaving unethically. After this latest incident, it’s clear that AMD has no intention of behaving honestly or ethically."
Grabbing the latest figures from SPEC.org, something AMD didn't do, George shows that the theoretical performance figures offered by AMD don't look so great in that different context.
He also has issues with the fact that the 2.6GHz Barcelona Opteron is simulated and won't ship this year, whereas Intel have been shipping the comparison Xeon since April.
For the ZDNet Technical Director to use such strong language and go after AMD like that is quite something, just as it is for AMD to publish a set of figures like they did in the first place.
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http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/07...e_looks_good/1
Early Barcelona performance looks good
AMD's Barcelona processor reportedly outperforms Intel's current processors by significant margins in synthetic benchmarks.
Update 15:10 04/07/07:
Having gathered more information, it turns out that the Barcelona benchmarks are performance estimations for Barcelona at 2.6GHz, not 2.3GHz as originally reported. The results are also based on "internal AMD simulations", so the validity of the results is somewhat questionable.
I've left the original story in place below, and there's also a picture of the slide at the bottom too.
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Amid speculation of even further delays to AMD's next-generation quad-core processors, the company has been talking about Barcelona's performance with its partners.
The Inquirer has managed to get hold of some of these figures, and although they're synthetic and won't give a true indication of application performance, they might give us an idea of what ballpark AMD is expecting to hit.
Despite the comparison being between competing server parts in the $800 USD price bracket, we think it's potentially very relevant because both the Opteron and Xeon processors are based on practically identical architectures to their desktop siblings.
According to the figures, AMD's quad-core Opteron, which is clocked at 2.3GHz, manages to outperform Intel's similarly priced 2.66GHz Xeon 5355 processor by a significant margin.
In SPECint_rate2006, a measure of integer performance, the unreleased Opteron is 21 percent faster than the Xeon. If that wasn't a big enough margin, the Xeon reportedly slips behind the Opteron by 50 percent in SPECfp_rate2006, a floating point benchmark. The latter is certainly an impressive margin and one that Intel will not be able to make up without a significant clock speed boost when it releases its 45nm Penryn processors.
Of course, we're going to remain sceptical until we've seen how well AMD's next-generation processors perform in real applications, but this does whet our appetite a bit while we're waiting for the launch in the fourth quarter of this year. Will you be waiting for some solid performance numbers before you make the plunge?
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...d.php?t=150396
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