Report attacks AMD speed ratings

Intel has launched a new broadside against AMD's policy of downplaying chip clock speed in favor of model numbers -- and this time it has drawn analyst firm Aberdeen Group into the fray.

The chip giant has funded a new report from Aberdeen: AMD's Gigahertz Equivalency: Inexperienced Buyers Accept Bad Science, which heavily criticizes AMD's model-number system as confusing to consumers and as "not justifiable in the benchmark science." The report predicts that "AMD...must soon retreat from the gigahertz equivalency positioning and take another performance rating approach."

AMD called the report a "shady marketing deal" that distorts the facts. "They get loads of things wrong in there," said an AMD spokesman, citing the Aberdeen report's assertion that the Athlon XP model numbers are designed to correspond to Pentium 4 clock speeds. "We've always very firmly said that the numbers compare with the previous generation of Athlon, for consistency," the spokesman said. "We've worked hard at explaining it and making it clear."

However, Aberdeen's report argues that "clearly the competitive comparisons are to Intel's microprocessors," positioning an Athlon XP 2100+, for example, as equal to a 2.1GHz Pentium 4. That comparison will grow quickly more erroneous as benchmarks, the operating systems and applications evolve, Aberdeen argues.

"The key flaw is that the equivalency rating is a snapshot in a moment in time -- and time surely marches on in the computer industry," the report says. "There is a distinct 'Pinocchio factor' that will only grow over time as pseudo-equivalency gradually becomes patently inaccurate."

News source: ZDNet News