ZDNet Technical Director calls shens on latest Barcelona performance figures

Wednesday 04th July 2007, 12:12:00 PM, written by Rys

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.

Read George's 'blog post in full over at zdnet.com.

Discuss on the forums

Tagging

amd ± zdnet, barcelona, shens, spec, opteron

Related amd News

RWT Analyzes Bulldozer Benchmarks
AMD Bulldozer microarchitecture analysis
Say hello to GLOBALFOUNDRIES
AMD completes deal with ATIC to create The Foundry Company
AMD Propus to be released in Q2 & Q3
AMD launch 45nm Phenom II processor
AMD goes Asset Smart; splits into two
Beyond Programmable Shading course notes available
AMD launches FireStream 9250 with 200Gflops DP via RV770
AMD GPGPU solutions get extra support from industry partners