by , 12:30 PM EST, March 28th, 2002
According to a recent ZDNet article titled "Report lambastes AMD's speed ratings," the Aberdeen Group has issued a report that is critical of AMD's efforts to disassociate clock speed from processor performance. The kicker is that it was Intel that funded the Aberdeen Group's study. AMD uses a rating system based on processor model comparisons to name its chips, rather than using clock speed for its naming scheme. Intel holds an advantage in the clock speed war because the company has specifically built its processors with this in mind, and the company has been openly critical of AMD's attempts to bypass that advantage. From the article:
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."
Of course, AMD believes that its rating system hold water, and says:
"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."
He also said that Aberdeen did not contact AMD in the course of making the report: "If you're writing about somebody, you'd tend to ask their opinion."
Both sides agree that clock speed is not the best way to measure preformance, but Intel maintains that it is the only sensible one for consumers. The article is an interesting read.
At least Intel is being up front about having funded the report that backs its position. Our friends at Microsoft can't always say the same thing in that they have often used front groups and organizations to pay for their propaganda tools.
In the meanwhile, Apple has been pretty quiet about its quest to separate clock speed from the CPU performance equation, preferring to bask in the glow of all the favorable reports about its new iMac, that has a processor clock speed less than half of some of Intel's and AMD's more highly rated CPUs. We hope Apple is actively searching for a performance yardstick, because the warmth Apple may be feeling today from the media can quickly take on a distinct chill if the perception of useability on Macs ever becomes a question. We believe it will. It's only a matter of time.