After a relatively quiet period in the competition between AMD
and Intel, AMD has once again lashed out against its chip rival.
AMD is accusing Intel of making outdated and skewed comparisons
between the chips of the two companies.
"I'm sick and tired of being pushed around by a competitor that
doesn't like fair and open competition," Henri Richard, executive
vice president and chief sales and marketing officer for AMD said
at a media event in San Francisco.
AMD alleged that Intel last week at a financial analyst conference
compared a single core AMD Opteron processor to the latest Intel
chip using the Spec 2000 benchmark. The benchmark has recently been
discontinued, rendering the comparison moot, he complained.
Intel spokesman George Alfs acknowledged that Intel used the Spec
2000 benchmark last week to compare its chips with an AMD
processor. But he denied that Intel used flawed data to make its
chip look better. Instead he insisted that the company relied on
data that AMD had submitted to the independent Spec group.
"We took their top public scores and compared them with our best
scores," Alfs told vnunet.com.
He furthermore questioned AMD for not filing an official complaint
with Intel or the Spec on its recent submissions to the
group.
Vendors commonly use industry standard benchmarks to show of the
performance of their hardware or software. The data is intended to
allow enterprises to compare the performance of competing systems.
But such metrics rarely reflect performance in real live
applications because the tests are commonly performed under ideal
conditions.
"AMD is frustrated that Intel is issuing misleading benchmark test
results. But everybody does it. It's a rotten system, but it's
better than the alternative," commented Nathan Brookwood, an
analyst covering semiconductor technologies with Insight 64.
The alternative, he added, would require manual testing by the end
user for each application and system.