Jerry in "evangelizing mode"
(a.k.a. "talking to the converts syndrome )
--------------------------------
AMD SAYS SPEED IS OVERRATED IN CHIP COMPARISONS 10.12.01
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Therese Poletti reported for Mercury News: Scrappy Advanced Micro Devices came
out swinging against foe Intel Tuesday with an aggressive campaign that seeks
to change how consumers judge the performance of chips when they are shopping
for a new personal computer.
In a rare news conference, the Sunnyvale-based chip maker said that the
current performance metric among PC chips -- clock speed, measured in
megahertz -- cannot be relied upon as the sole measure of system performance.
"Megahertz is only half the story," said AMD Chairman and Chief Executive W.J.
Sanders III, in an interview. "The other half is how much work is done per
clock tick."
Sanders said that Intel's new Pentium 4 chip family is not only inferior to
AMD's Athlon family, but it also gets 20 percent less work done than the
fastest Pentium III chip.
"Intel is the Wizard of Oz when it comes to marketing," he said. "Someone has
to pull the curtain back."
As part of its effort to stress performance over clock speed, AMD said its
newest processor will be marketed as the Athlon XP 1800+, 1700+, 1600+, and
1500+ to indicate their performance relative to Intel processors.
For example, even though the clock speed of the Athlon XP 1800+ is 1.5
gigahertz, AMD said the chip's performance is really equivalent to a
1.8-gigahertz Intel chip and it does more work than a 2 gigahertz Intel
Pentium 4 in certain applications, at half the cost. AMD said it is launching
a 2 gigahertz Athlon early next year.
AMD plans a major advertising campaign to educate consumers about its view of
performance.
The company also named Patrick Moorhead as AMD's vice president of customer
advocacy, reporting to the office of the chief executive. AMD also hired
accounting and consulting firm Arthur Andersen to conduct third-party tests of
the new chips.
Robert Manetta, a spokesman for Intel, said that the Santa Clara chip giant
would not comment directly on the competition. "We feel really good right
now," said Manetta. "We have the highest-performing desktop processor on the
market, period, and we have just begun."
Analysts said it will be difficult to educate consumers who have been trained
by both of these companies for many years to use clock speed as their gauge
for performance. Sanders said "when the truth is on your side, it will
prevail."
Previously, many product reviewers, including PC World, said AMD's fastest
Athlon, the 1.4 gigahertz version, outperformed the fastest Pentium 4 in many
applications.
On Tuesday, Mercury Research of Scottsdale, Ariz., said that results for the
Model 1800+ were mixed. The review, posted on its Web site called The Meter,
said the new chip does not close the performance gap with the Pentium 4 on the
game Quake but does outperform the Pentium on the more traditional benchmarks
in its suite.
Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64 in Saratoga, said he believes it
is time for a new measurement of performance, and he said the PC industry
should use the SPEC benchmark that is used by the workstation and server chip
market, sponsored by a non-profit company called Standard Performance
Evaluation Corp.
Brookwood noted that in the SPEC integer test, called SPECint, the 1.5
gigahertz Athlon outperforms the Pentium 4 in business applications, with an
overall score of 648 to Intel's 640. He noted, however, that in the floating
point test, also called SPECfp, which measures key graphics for gamers, Intel
outperformed AMD.
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