AMD Won't Endorse SYSmark 2012 Benchmark
AMD claims that SYSmark 2012 is "misleading" and doesn't offer "clear and reliable measurements." Ouch.
Tuesday AMD made it officially well-known that it has no plans to endorse BAPCo's upcoming SYSmark 2012 benchmark. In fact, America's #2 processor giant has resigned from the BAPCo organization altogether, and even hinted that SYSmark 2012 doesn't provide "clear and reliable measurements" and is "misleading." AMD's Nigel Dessau followed up with a little clarification on the company's stance Tuesday in his blog.
"The heart of our complaint is this: the SYSmark benchmark is not only comprised of unrepresentative workloads (workloads that ignore the importance of heterogeneous computing and, frankly, favor our competitor’s designs), but it actually generates misleading results that can lead to very poor purchasing decisions, causing governments worldwide to historically overspend somewhere in the area of approximately $8B!" he said.
Dessau went on to explain that AMD tried to work within the BAPCo consortium in order to get the next-generation benchmark, SYSmark 2012, correct. AMD even stressed that it needed to be open, transparent and processor-neutral. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
"Our good intentions were met with an outcome that we believe does a disservice to the industry and our customers," he said. "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."
That said, AMD pulled itself out of BAPCo and asked that the AMD brand be removed from marketing materials promoting SYSmark 2012. According to the company's official press release, it will only endorse benchmarks based on real-world computing models and software applications, and which provide useful and relevant information.
"AMD believes benchmarks should be constructed to provide unbiased results and be transparent to customers making decisions based on those results," AMD said in an official statement. "Currently, AMD is evaluating other benchmarking alternatives, including encouraging the creation of an industry consortium to establish an open benchmark to measure overall system performance."
"We are committed to working with likeminded companies that want to give consumers and business users an accurate, honest measure of what they can expect from their PCs and mobile devices," Dessau added.
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Wow. BAPCo only have two processor companies to work with respectfully and they've hacked one of them off. Surely they could have accommodated AMD's point of view.
Benchmark scores are always such an abstract measure that I only use synthetic benchmarking software for stability testing any how. Even with THG articles I skip past those numbers and go to the real-world tests.
For how long were these benchmarks compiled with the Intel C compiler with the dodgy code path choices if the processor name string did not contain INTEL?
It's not just AMD crying foul. VIA has done the same. Bapco is essentially Intel's pet goat.