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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: fyo who wrote (63639)	6/28/1999 6:08:00 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 1571438

fyo, clarification on Elmer's "faster" (0.5%) Xeon. Some absolute numbers were leaked to JC's page jc-news.com (see 99/06/18, 1:05pm) Elmer complained that the numbers quoted for the Xeon were not the fastest Xeon system in the SPEC database. I discovered that that particular system used 256M of RAM, which may explain the discrepancy. More importantly, it brings up the weakness of the SPEC database for comparing CPU's. Since every manufacturer uses different hardware configurations, it is nearly impossible to compare CPU's using the database. Therefore, the kind of disclosure made by AMD, in which both the Athlon and the PIII used the same configuration, is more useful to the consumer. The lack of any absolute numbers is undoubtedly due to the legal prohibition for publishing SPECmark numbers on systems which are not yet commercially available. Petz

To: fyo who wrote (63639)	6/28/1999 11:17:00 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571438

rE: "As I posted earlier today, the SPEC scores were achieved under NT (and NT only). Windows98 was used only for the Winbench scores." In the absence of any published claim to that effect I don't think you can assume it is true. Re: "With regards to the latter part: None of us know what the absolute score of the unit Dirk Meyer used was (Intel _or_ AMD), so Elmer could not have found one that was .5% faster." Dirk made his comparison between a Xeon and a K7 while AMD compared against a PIII. A look at the SPEC scores shows no PIII scores for 550MHz, but at 500MHz there is as much as 8.33% difference between a PIII and a Xeon, almost exactly the lead AMD is claiming for the K7. So in the bewildering absence of scores or OS clarification I think there are more questions than answers. Plus there is NOTHING to stop AMD from publishing estimates, just like Alpha did long before actually shipping 21264s. The refusal to clarify suggests that there is nothing to gain and everything to lose by providing real data. Especially at the same time the company is sheepishly admitting to STAGGERING losses for Q2 and likely even worse loses for Q3. The "announcement" had no benchmarks, no product, no customers, but a real nice new set of foils! Just the kind of thing to make the "true believers" giddy with delight. Flip a few more foils, shovel em another load of BS and they'll be happy for a couple more months, works every time! Then do it all over again. It's been working for years so why stop now? EP