Shame on AMD and its management for condoning this behavior.

Hooray to tech journalists like Sylvie and George for calling AMD out on the carpet.

I do not want to say that you are endorsed with Microsoft, but your benchmark will point some facts.
AMD right now have not enough raw performance to compete with Intel. But the benchmarks they did are around the area they are better: power management. At their frequency they compete better with Intel. Probably the AMD products will have similar pricing (or a bit bigger) than an old CPU from Intel and the market they address is much lower. AMD Ati 4850 is very known to be *almost* "top of the hill" video card but with very good pricing. The market that AMD address is server with lower power consumption.

And I am completely sure that at that point AMD do not want to trick, only to prove that Intel on that range of products are loosely performers. For sure AMD cannot compete with Nehalem architecture, but it have not why to do it.

It is fair to admit that the benchmark shown by AMD was right on the low-range 2-socket CPUs, and not necesarily on raw performance, but on power consumption.

As seen so, you appear biased on your comments, but are ok as a sensational title and content

AMD should focus on their own products rather than trying to attack older Intel platforms and end up looking desperate and dishonest. AMD should focus on their positive points which I high lighted in the end of my article. AMD should focus on their Shanghai launch.

1. Never accept literature from a specific company as gospel truth.
2. Ask for demonstrations of a product before accepting of a product’s promises and all of the product’s promises.
3. Hit the forums to see other reviews of a companies products. If they have had a bad rep in the past, they might be doomed to have one again.

Example being, I keep trying to turn down Panda Security because they spammed their home users with their own Anti-spam product.

I think that AMD has some newer products in the pipe which while begin to make them competitive with the Intel of today, while the i7 series now has Intel looking untouchable once again. For the moment, AMD is playing the marketing game and losing at it.

George, thanks for giving AMD some credit for their strides they have made, I while they need to be slapped around a bit for the repeated offenses on submitting old Intel results, may be if we complement them for what they are doing right, they will continue to strive to be better again instead of paying the poor schmucks in the advertising department.

It is your own self-established premise that the SPEC benchmarks should only be used in a "best vs. best" (or in your own words "Indy-500-type") contest. AMD doesn’t claim to enter that contest with the results in question nor does SPEC state anywhere that this is the purpose of their benchmark suites. It is this self-righteous definition of ground rules alone which justifies your accusation of deceit.

Real customers may very well choose not to opt for the 5100 chipset. It’s currently impossible to equip it with more than 24GB of memory and it obviously isn’t the best performer, since Intel continues to use the 5400 or 5000P chipsets for benchmarks in which power consumption is not measured. It is almost certain that real customers will equip their systems with more than the 8GB of memory that testers use for the best power efficiency results. It is also very unlikely they will allow memory page locking for the JVM account. Those real customers may very well be interested in a comparison between systems which better resemble their actual setup and therefor AMD’s submission is completely valid.

It’s laughable to accuse AMD of deceit when the full configuration disclosure is there for anyone to examine and more than exposing any dishonesty on AMD’s side, you’re accusing what you call "the public" of ignorance on a large scale.

So AMD is allowed to submit results on behalf of Intel or vice versa if everything was disclosed. The problem is that what they’ve disclosed shows that AMD put up a mediocre Intel system at best with mediocre optimizations while they turned in the best possible results for the AMD server.

I thought I understood SPEC to be a third party. The competing parties should both configure the best of what they have, submit to SPEC, then SPEC should handle publishing.

Is this to simplified? Does SPEC not have the resources to manage this? Do they need additional capital?

Can AMD not pull the best of the best from this central repository of results hosted by SPEC?

Obviously I think AMD’s marketing is trying to pull every trick in the book to sell the world on the greatness of a subpar product.

You admit it’s AMD’s best versus a mediocre Intel system that AMD picked. So you’re essentially admitting that I am right so your criticism of me is hypocritical.

The point is that you can’t have identical systems and if they wanted identical, they should have used the same type of memory since both vendors support the same memory and have done so for at least a year. The point is that if we’re going to do a comparison, a competitive analysis, you cannot have one vendor pick the best system for himself and pick the mediocre system from his competitor. If you’re going to have a comparison, a contest, you need to let both vendors pick their optimized systems. For this reason, AMD’s comparison is dishonest.

Refering to your sensationalist reporting on some past incident doesn’t help you build a case, but only shows you having a history of picking up every opportunity you get to attack AMD, casting reasonable doubt on your impartiality.

I thought that may have had something to do with your ZDNet contract, but I realize now that it’s a personal matter.

SPEC has rules for disclosure on comparisons and AMD has flaunted those rules in the past.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=753