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To: MONACO who wrote (86989)	8/19/1999 12:36:00 PM
From: L. Adam Latham	Respond to of 186894

All: Interesting link and article from the AMD thread: ebnonline.com Benchmarking firm claims AMD manipulated Athlon test results By Mark Hachman Electronic Buyers' News (08/19/99, 09:33:13 AM EDT) A Canadian benchmarking firm claimed yesterday that Advanced Micro Devices Inc. modified tests to give its Athlon microprocessor an unfair advantage over Intel Corp.'s Pentium III. FutureMark Software Corp. Ltd. said AMD is violating the trademark of the Toronto company's 3DMark 99 MAX test suite and related licensing agreement. While FutureMark has not taken any legal action against AMD, the company said that AMD's actions were "inappropriate." According to FutureMark, AMD modified the 3DMark 99 MAX test by optimizing the DLL test code for its recently released Athlon. AMD's own test results demonstrated that, in one of the two 3DMark tests, the 600-MHz Athlon outperformed the 600-MHz Pentium III by over 30%. Of the 13 test results accompanying AMD's Athlon press release, the 3DMark figures were among the highest in favor of the chip. FutureMark's claims are the latest example of "specmanship," the complicated practice of manipulating the convoluted melange of testing applications and benchmarks. Benchmarks are a series of tests performed to reduce a chip's performance in a variety of applications and situations to a single, simplified number for marketing purposes. The process is further complicated because the choice of tests itself is somewhat subjective. A spokesman for AMD noted that mention of the customized 3DMark test suite was fully disclosed on page 39 of a 42-page "software performance guide" accompanying the test results. In the guide, AMD makes no mention of optimizing its code for the other test suites. EBN calls to those test software manufacturers have not been returned. Several test firms have said in the recent past, however, that the Athlon generally outperforms the Pentium III in a variety of applications. Where AMD erred, according to FutureMark, was in comparing the optimized Athlon results to the generic test suite used with the Pentium III. FutureMark said that official results should be based solely on the same 3DMark test being applied across the board to all microprocessors. "No other CPU manufacturers have been given a chance to make optimizations," FutureMark said in a statement. "As such, it is inappropriate to compare the AMD special DLL version results with the official 3DMark 99 MAX version results." A FutureMark spokesman declined to comment further.