Re: The economy is in the toilet and you can blame Barrett all you want but that doesn't make for an economic rebound.
It was on Barrett's watch that Intel fraudulently claimed performance levels that its chips didn't provide, and Intel is now facing a class action lawsuit because of it.
Class action suits are wildcards - sometimes they just fade away and sometimes they take the corporation down. Look at Corning and Johns Manville.
Here's part of what was in the New York Times, today:
The organization that provides these performance ratings is the Business Applications Performance Corporation, which was founded in 1995 by Intel, Compaq, Dell, I.B.M. and several computer industry publishing companies to measure computer performance. A.M.D. only recently became a member.
Criticism of the consortium's new measure, known as the SYSmark 2002 benchmark, appeared first on several Internet Web sites run by technical experts. The criticism came after the circulation by A.M.D. of a presentation of its objections to the newest version of the benchmark.
"A.M.D. certainly did highlight a number of interesting issues with SYSmark," said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight64, a market research firm based in Saratoga, Calif. "To the best of my knowledge, those have been not been resolved satisfactorily."
A.M.D.'s ire was raised after the SYSmark 2002 benchmark showed that Intel's Pentium 4 microprocessor had handily outperformed A.M.D.'s competing Athlon XP processor. Previously, using the SYSmark 2001 benchmark, the Athlon XP had outperformed comparable Pentium 4 processors, even though the Athlon's clock speed is 2.133 gigahertz, or 2.133 billion ticks a second, and the Pentium's is 2.8 gigahertz.
A.M.D., which is based in Sunnyvale, Calif., said that when its engineers explored the changes in the 2002 version of the SYSmark benchmark, they discovered that tasks that favored A.M.D. had been removed, tasks that favored Intel had been added and several of the tasks that favored Intel had been repeated multiple times during the test.
Over all, A.M.D. asserted that 14 tests in which the Athlon A.M.D. had achieved its largest advantage over the Pentium 4 had been removed from the 2002 version of SYSmark. |
