Tom's Blurb: Microprocessor Forum and the Cold War of the x86-processor makers

Here I am with my good old column!! The reason for the long delay since the last blurb was either that I didn't find the time or I wasn't angry enough to write something off my chest. This has changed now in terms of angriness, the time issue will probably remain the same until I'm 60. What am I so angry about then?

Michael Slater Missed The Point

Well, some two weeks ago I attended Microprocessor Forum 1999 in San Jose California. This conference is seen as one of the major yearly events in terms of processor announcements and I attended it alongside with famous Andreas Stiller from c't-Magazine. The first day we went to Michael Slater's Seminar, which was supposed to wrap up the current state of the PC-processor world and give an outlook for the near future. Unfortunately this seminar was nothing to write home about, which is why I couldn't be bothered covering it. Amongst other things Slater presented us CPU-benchmark data from Intel and his apology for that was:

The comment to this slide went "as long as we [Micro Design Resources] don't get our own lab and do our own benchmarks, you will have to live without competitive benchmark data." I guess that I am not the only one who has to be offended by this, every other dedicated hardware website and the majority of the German and other European magazines have also all reasons to disagree with this remark. Tom's Hardware Guide does competitive benchmarking of X86-processors for several years now and I know for a fact that MDR reads us. They particularly enjoyed my 3DWinbench-article from last year.

What upset me though was Michael Slater's complete ignorance of the most ridiculous thing that's currently happening in the X86-processor scene. The cold war Intel is fighting against AMD.