AMD PR ratings slammed as misleading
Pinocchio factor, Aberdeen claims
By Mike Magee, 26/03/2002 12:02:51 BST
fib Tell a (trival or venial) lie - Oxford English Dictionary
A WHITE PAPER from the Aberdeen Group has laid into Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for allegedly fibbing about its PR rating, likening its stance to "Pinocchio", whose nose just grew and grew, as he told one fib after another.
The report, called AMD's Gigahertz Equivalency: Inexperienced Buyers Accept Bad Science, makes a number of allegations suggesting that the firm's PR (performance rating) is fundamentally flawed.
Indeed, the document calls the PR rating the "Pinocchio Factor" – an allegation that AMD must surely rebut.
The paper says: "There is a distinct “Pinocchio factor” that will only grow over time as pseudo-equivalency gradually becomes patently inaccurate." Aberdeen is calling AMD a big fibber.
One sentence accuses AMD of quackery: "The fact is that AMD processors are quite efficient for lots of applications and do not need the steroids of hokey equivalency to deserve market respect."
According to the document, the "key flaw" is that the equivalency rating is a snap in time, and is subject to variations over time.
The example given is that the XP 2000+ runs at 1.667GHz and is supposed to be equivalent to Intel's Pentium 4 2GHz Willamette core, but that has changed because of performance improvements with the latest Northwood core.
However, processor performance should not be measured in Gigahertz, argues Aberdeen, and should instead be based on software applications and the like.
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