After a relatively quiet period in the competition between AMD and Intel, AMD has once again lashed out against its chip rival. AMD is accusing Intel of making outdated and skewed comparisons between the chips of the two companies.
"I'm sick and tired of being pushed around by a competitor that doesn't like fair and open competition," Henri Richard, executive vice president and chief sales and marketing officer for AMD said at a media event in San Francisco.
AMD alleged that Intel last week at a financial analyst conference compared a single core AMD Opteron processor to the latest Intel chip using the Spec 2000 benchmark. The benchmark has recently been discontinued, rendering the comparison moot, he complained.
Intel spokesman George Alfs acknowledged that Intel used the Spec 2000 benchmark last week to compare its chips with an AMD processor. But he denied that Intel used flawed data to make its chip look better. Instead he insisted that the company relied on data that AMD had submitted to the independent Spec group.
"We took their top public scores and compared them with our best scores," Alfs told vnunet.com.
He furthermore questioned AMD for not filing an official complaint with Intel or the Spec on its recent submissions to the group.
Vendors commonly use industry standard benchmarks to show of the performance of their hardware or software. The data is intended to allow enterprises to compare the performance of competing systems. But such metrics rarely reflect performance in real live applications because the tests are commonly performed under ideal conditions.
"AMD is frustrated that Intel is issuing misleading benchmark test results. But everybody does it. It's a rotten system, but it's better than the alternative," commented Nathan Brookwood, an analyst covering semiconductor technologies with Insight 64.
The alternative, he added, would require manual testing by the end user for each application and system.