Intel, HP, Gateway sued over Pentium 4 performance

Intel, and its PC customers, face class action with the litigants claiming a Pentium 4 doesn't perform any better than a Pentium III or an AMD Athlon. The report, in US publication PC World, said that the complaint was filed in early June. It is jointly filed against Intel, Gateway and Hewlett Packard, and the class action complains the introduction of the Pentium 4 led to misleading performance claims.

The class action centres around the performance of the processors, the so-called Megahertz Myth.

Intel and competitor AMD for years leapfrogged each other by launching new CPUs at higher MHz speeds, until last year, when the latter firm introduced the so-called PR rating. This claims to measure the performance of a chip by reference to the real world results of applications, rather than just raw speed.

Any court which tackles this kind of case will have to face the horrors of benchmarketing, a quicksand that has trapped many over the years.

News source: The Inquirer